“A Pre-Registered, Multi-Lab Non-Replication of the Action-Sentence Compatibility Effect (ACE)”, Richard D. Morey, Michael P. Kaschak, Antonio M. Díez-Álamo, Arthur M. Glenberg, Rolf A. Zwaan, Daniël Lakens, Agustín Ibáñez, Adolfo García, Claudia Gianelli, John L. Jones, Julie Madden, Florencia Alifano, Benjamin Bergen, Nicholas G. Bloxsom, Daniel N. Bub, Zhenguang G. Cai, Christopher R. Chartier, Anjan Chatterjee, Erin Conwell, Susan Wagner Cook, Joshua D. Davis, Ellen R. K. Evers, Sandrine Girard, Derek Harter, Franziska Hartung, Eduar Herrera, Falk Huettig, Stacey Humphries, Marie Juanchich, Katharina Kühne, Shulan Lu, Tom Lynes, Michael E. J. Masson, Markus Ostarek, Sebastiaan Pessers, Rebecca Reglin, Sara Steegen, Erik D. Thiessen, Laura E. Thomas, Sean Trott, Joachim Vandekerckhove, Wolf Vanpaemel, Maria Vlachou, Kristina Williams, Noam Ziv-Crispel2021-11-09 (psychology, scientific bias; backlinks; similar):
The Action-sentence Compatibility Effect (ACE) is a well-known demonstration of the role of motor activity in the comprehension of language. Participants are asked to make sensibility judgments on sentences by producing movements toward the body or away from the body. The ACE is the finding that movements are faster when the direction of the movement (eg. ‘toward’) matches the direction of the action in the to-be-judged sentence (eg. ‘Art gave you the pen’ describes action toward you).
We report on a pre-registered, multi-lab replication of one version of the ACE.
The results show that none of the 18 labs involved in the study observed a reliable ACE, and that the meta-analytic estimate of the size of the ACE was essentially zero.
Figure 6: Action-sentence Compatibility Effect (ACE) interaction effects on the logarithm of the lift-off times across all labs.Thick error bars show standard errors from the linear mixed effects model analysis; thin error bars are the corresponding 95% CI. The shaded region represents our pre-registered, predicted conclusions about the ACE: Effects within the lighter shaded region were pre-registered as too small to be consistent with the ACE; effects in the dark gray region were pre-registered as negligibly small. Above the gray region was considered consistent with the extant ACE literature.
Figure 7: Action-sentence Compatibility Effect (ACE) interaction effects on the logarithm of the move times across all labs.Thick error bars show standard errors from the linear mixed effects model analysis; thin error bars are the corresponding 95% CI. Asterisks before the names indicate a singular fit due to the random effect variance of items being estimated as 0. For comparability of the effect, we include them here so that all effects presented were estimated using the same model.
