The neural time course of self-oriented pointing and labeling in visual processing

Abstract

Pointing and labeling are traditionally seen as communicative behaviors; the present study examines their neurocognitive consequences when produced for oneself. Twenty-four participants completed a priming task in which they encoded a color prime in three within-subjects conditions: point, label, and point & label. Following each prime, participants judged whether a target object belonged to the same (congruent) or different (incongruent) color category. Target-locked ERPs showed effects of congruence and encoding conditions spanning early and later processing stages. At early latencies, pointing elicited a more positive posterior P1 than labeling, while the combined point & label condition was intermediate and did not differ reliably from either unimodal condition, consistent with a non-additive interaction at early perceptual-attentional stages. At later latencies, pointing alone elicited a larger posterior P2 and smaller central-parietal late negativity (300–500 ms) than labeling alone, and the combined condition diverged from pointing while closely paralleling labeling. Together, these results indicate that pointing and labeling for oneself exert distinct, non-additive influences on downstream object processing, with early processing showing graded interaction and later perceptual and conceptual processing increasingly influenced by labeling.