Meaning over familiarity: A secret ingredient for stimulus-response binding effects that exceeds perceptual features.

Action control theories assume that responding to a stimulus leads to binding of stimulus features and the response into a common representation. Repeating any of its components retrieves previous information, causing interference in case of partial repetitions, and leading to so-called stimulus-response binding effects. It has been argued that familiar stimuli (e.g., a yellow banana) lead to larger binding effects than unfamiliar ones (e.g., a yellow strawberry). However, none has systematically investigated how strong the impact of familiarity is on responding and which role meaning is playing hereby. In the present study, we investigated the influence of familiarity and meaningfulness on binding and retrieval. In a first step, the influence of familiarity was investigated by using familiar word (Experiment 1a) and letter (Experiment 1b) stimuli, both meaningful, while participants had to respond to the color of the presented stimuli. In both experiments we found evidence for stronger stimulus-response binding effects for familiar stimuli in contrast to unfamiliar/meaningless stimuli. In the next step, we tried to disentangle the effects of familiarity and meaningfulness by varying familiarity via word frequency with constant meaningfulness (Experiment 2) and by varying meaningfulness via a learning phase prior to experimental start with constant familiarity (Experiment 3). The present study suggests that not simply familiarity but the meaningfulness that usually comes with familiar objects leads to stronger binding and retrieval effects. This has wide implications for action control research, as it suggests that stimulus-response associations are boosted by factors that exceed the perceptual features of stimuli. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2025 APA, all rights reserved).