These findings suggest that, for this patient, simple observation of a graspable object might be sufficient to elicit the associated motor plan for interacting with that object, even when the plan conflicts with current goals (see also Blakemore et al., 2002). Indeed, such involuntary grasping behaviour in AHS may be related to the longstanding view that, even in healthy adults, viewing visual objects can automatically prime actions in the UMI-77 price observer. AHS might represent an exaggerated form of such automatic priming. Gibson (1979) described “affordances” as properties of objects in the environment which prime an observer to act. For example, seeing a teapot with the handle to the right might automatically

prime the observer to reach out with the right hand to grasp the handle. Object affordance effects such as these have been extensively studied Dabrafenib chemical structure in healthy adults using stimulus-response compatibility paradigms (e.g., Cho and Proctor, 2010; Derbyshire et al., 2006; Iani et al., 2011; McBride et al., 2012b; Pellicano et al., 2010; Phillips and Ward, 2002; Tucker and Ellis, 1998, 2001). For example, Tucker and Ellis (1998) presented pictures of objects which healthy observers classified as upright or inverted as quickly and accurately as possible using a manual button press. Crucially, the objects could be presented so that they maximally afforded a response with either the left or the right hand. Although

this left/right orientation was irrelevant to the participants’ task, responses were significantly

faster and more accurate when participants responded with a hand that was congruent with the (task-irrelevant) response afforded by the object. These findings, and the many others like them (e.g., Cho and Proctor, 2010; Derbyshire et al., 2006; Iani et al., 2011; McBride et al., 2012b; Pellicano et al., 2010; Phillips and Ward, 2002; Tucker and Ellis, 1998, 2001), suggest that through experience observers associate objects with particular actions, and that these actions can be (partially) evoked by perceptual processing of the object even when they are irrelevant to the observer’s task. Of course, in healthy people, objects see more do not always elicit actions towards them; that would make people entirely stimulus-bound. Hence there is a need to suppress such automatically evoked affordances. Indeed in healthy observers, there is now compelling evidence that responses automatically primed by the environment can also be automatically suppressed (for reviews see Eimer and Schlaghecken, 2003; McBride et al., 2012a; Sumner, 2007). Using a backwards masked priming paradigm, Eimer and Schlaghecken (1998) showed that participants’ responses to targets were typically speeded if targets were preceded by a compatible prime (a prime associated with the same response as the target) compared to when targets followed an incompatible prime (a prime associated with the opposite response to the target).