Verbal and pragmatic coding

Planning reaching and grasping an object requires selective computation of extrinsic (i.e. distance) and intrinsic (i.e. size) object properties, respectively. However, the mechanism for this selection can be partially effective in this process, and nonrelevant object attributes can be used. An experiment was carried out to test whether linguistic information on object properties, as well as sensorial object information, could be automatically involved in movement planning. Subjects were required to reach and grasp a wooden bar, that could have two sizes and could be placed at two spatial positions. An Italian word, either lungo (long) or corto (short) was written on the external face of th…