Spatial shifts in swiping actions, the impact of “left” and “right” verbalizations

Movements are often modulated by the meaning of cue words. We explore the interaction between verbal and visual constraints during a movement by investigating if spoken words during movement execution bias late movement control of swiping actions on a tablet when vision of the target is removed during the movement. Verbalization trials required participants to vocalize the spatial directions ‘LEFT’, ‘MIDDLE’, or ‘RIGHT’ of the active target, relative to the other presented targets. A late influence of semantics emerged on movement execution in verbalized trials with action endpoints landing more in the direction of the spoken word than without verbalization. The emergence of the semantic effect as the movement progresses reflects the temporal unfolding of the visual and verbal constraints during the swiping action. Comparing our current results with a similar task using a variant verbalization, we also conclude that, larger semantic content effects are found with spatial direction than numerical magnitude verbalization. SUPPLEMENTARY INFORMATION: The online version contains supplementary material available at 10.1007/s00221-022-06348-0.