The emotional valence of an object drives its grasping prediction: behavioural evidence

Action and perception share a common sensorimotor network permitting a functional action-perception coupling. This coupling would permit to predict the outcome of others’ actions. Moreover, recent findings suggest that action perception linkage could be sensitive to emotional content of the visual scene. The present study sought to address the effect of an emotion-laden objects (i.e., pleasant, unpleasant and neutral) onto action prediction processing. To this end, we compared the participants’ temporal estimative of the hand contact with emotional objects in occlusion and full vision conditions. We found that the object’s valence strongly interfered in the prediction of its grasping. Indeed, the participants highly anticipated the touch instant for unpleasant valence compared to pleasant and neutral ones. Moreover, the visual conditions (i.e., occlusion and full vision) affect the magnitude of the predictive error except to unpleasant object. Accordingly, the present results unveil that emotional valence of an object drives the prediction of the its touch instant.