Most recent research on human tool use highlighted how people might integrate multiple sources of information through different neurocognitive systems to exploit the environment for action. This mechanism of integration is known as “action reappraisal”. In the present eye-tracking study, we further tested the action reappraisal idea by devising a word-priming paradigm to investigate how semantically congruent (e.g., “nail”) vs. semantically incongruent words (e.g., “jacket”) that preceded the vision of tools (e.g., a hammer) may affect participants' visual exploration of them. We found an implicit modulation of participants' temporal allocation of visuospatial attention as a function of the object-word consistency. Indeed, participants tended to increase over time their fixations on tools' manipulation areas under semantically congruent conditions. Conversely, participants tended to concentrate their visual-spatial attention on tools’ functional areas when inconsistent object-word pairs were presented. These results support and extend the information-integrated perspective of the action reappraisal approach. Also, these findings provide further evidence about how higher-level semantic information may influence tools' visual exploration.

最近关于人类工具使用的研究强调了人们如何通过不同的神经认知系统整合多种信息来源，以利用环境采取行动。这种整合机制被称为“行动重新评估”。在目前的眼动追踪研究中，我们通过设计一个词启动范式来进一步测试动作重估的想法，以研究在视觉之前语义一致（例如，“指甲”）与语义不一致的词（例如，“夹克”）工具（例如，锤子）的数量可能会影响参与者对它们的视觉探索。我们发现参与者的视觉空间注意力的时间分配的隐式调制作为对象-词一致性的函数。事实上，随着时间的推移，参与者倾向于增加他们对工具的关注。语义一致条件下的操作区域。相反，当呈现不一致的对象-词对时，参与者倾向于将他们的视觉空间注意力集中在工具的功能区域上。这些结果支持并扩展了行动重估方法的信息整合视角。此外，这些发现提供了关于更高级别语义信息如何影响工具的视觉探索的进一步证据。