Mere perception of a familiar object automatically leads to the activation of corresponding motor programs representing typical actions with this object also known as affordances. Despite substantial research, the issue of a control over irrelevantly potentiated affordances remains unclear. However, two theoretical accounts are can be entertained: (1) automatic and unintended self-inhibitory process or (2) intended and active process due to executive control. We tested these two accounts in two experiments using a dual-task paradigm: The lateral affordance task was accompanied by a parallel interference task (backward-counting in Experiment 1 and auditory Stroop in Experiment 2). In both Experiments the affordance task was the same: Participants were presented with photographs of graspable objects and asked to classify these as upright/inverted by making left-/right-hand responses. Objects' handles were also oriented leftward or rightward resulting in match/mismatch response condition. A central inhibition account predicts that the decrease in cognitive resource due to the dual-task scenario should lead to the disinhibition of potentiated actions and positively modulate the corresponding stimulus-response compatibility (SRC) effect. A self-inhibition account predicts that the depletion of cognitive resources due to the dual-task scenario should result in the self-inhibition of irrelevantly potentiated affordances leading to the attribution of an inverted SRC effect. We registered (1) an inverse SRC effect in Experiment 1 and (2) no SRC effect a?? in Experiment 2. Our results, therefore, provide partial support to the self-inhibition account. We propose that in supraliminal conditions a threshold for self-inhibition is raised because more efficient mechanism of monitoring is available. At the same time, the threshold drops when monitoring is unavailable, and the inverse SRC is observed. Finally, our data imply that different executive processes may play distinct roles in controlling manual affordances.
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