The end-state comfort (ESC) effect reflects the tendency to adopt an initially awkward grasp to achieve a comfortable final posture, indicating anticipatory planning in manual actions. Previous research (Kämpfer et al., 2024) suggests that such anticipatory relationships between initial and final action states are stored in memory and can be measured using a priming paradigm. The present study aimed to investigate whether this anticipatory activation during action perception relies primarily on object-related or grasp-related representations. Twenty-three participants viewed prime images showing comfortable (overhand) or uncomfortable (underhand) initial grasp postures holding a colored bar, followed by target images depicting comfortable (thumb-up) or uncomfortable (thumb-down) final postures. Different action sequences were represented by the prime-target pairs reflecting either physically possible or physically impossible movements. Two task contexts using identical stimuli were employed, an object-related task requiring participants to respond to the top color of the bar, and a grasp-related task requiring classification of the hand posture in the target. Results revealed a task-dependent modulation of ESC congruency. In the object-related task, responses were faster for ESC-congruent targets (thumb-up following underhand primes), but only for physically possible sequences. In contrast, in the grasp-related task, ESC-congruent combinations led to slower responses, independent of physical possibility. These findings indicate that anticipatory activation of future action states is sensitive to task context. Although the underlying mechanisms remain unclear, the results suggest that distinct cognitive processes may contribute to object- and grasp-related action representations.