Subliminal Semantic Processing of Grasping Actions: Evidence from ERP Measures of Action-Verb Priming.
Behavioral sciences (Basel, Switzerland) January 30, 2026 Yanglan Yu, Anmin Li
Grasp-related verbs processed without conscious awareness can influence how people recognize grasping actions. In a masked priming paradigm, participants classified objects requiring either precision or power grasps while subliminal Chinese action verbs served as primes. Behavioral responses were faster for semantically congruent cue-target pairs. Event-related potentials revealed congruency effects in the N400, P600, and P300 components, reflecting semantic integration, conflict monitoring, and action-related evaluation. Both precision- and power-grasping actions showed evidence of unconscious semantic processing, though they produced distinct neural patterns. These findings support the view that action-language processing involves overlapping neural mechanisms with action execution, even below the threshold of awareness.