In recent years, the role of manipulability in object identification has drawn much attention from psychologists. Object manipulability is the knowledge regarding how does an individual grasp an object and move it, or use it by its function. A growing number of evidence has indicated that manipulation knowledge is a part of object representation, and therefore, affects object identification process. The present study, with priming paradigm, explored the extent to which an manipulable object is processd before its manipulation knowledge activated, and systematically examined the different roles played by structural manipulation as well as functional manipulation in the recognition of manipulable objects. In Experiment 1, it was found that passively viewing a manipulable object was sufficient to evoke its manipulability , which in turn affected the processing of target objects. With static hand gesture as primes, both Experiment 2a and 2b had found that it was only functional manipulation that affected the processing and identification of “manipulation conflict objects”(objects associated with different structural manipulation and functional manipulation). In Experiment 3 and Experiment 4, instead of static hand gestures, dynamic hand manipulation videos were used as primes, the results showed that only functional manipulation had consistent and strong effect on the recognition of manipulation conflict and non-conflict target objects (object with both structural and functional manipulation, but the two are the same at the initial action stage). Although functional manipulation congruency effects existed in all the four experiments, further analysis had demonstrated that they were largely attributed to male subjects, who generally have significant higher experience than female subjects to manipulate the target objects. And while there was no structural manipulation congruency effect in Experiment 3 on the whole, it did emerge in a significant scale only in male subjects. The results may suggest that action priming effect would be modulated by individual’s manipulation experience with target objects. This research provided strong evidence for the role of dorsal pathway in object identification that previously considered subserved only by ventral pathway, and also for “sensory-motor model of conceptual knowledge” arguing that object knowledge was represented in a distributed sensory-motor system in the brain.
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