The duration of word meaning responses: Stroop interference for different preexposures of the word

Since the 1960s, researchers have been reporting that stress reduces Stroop interference. This is puzzling, as stress and anxiety typically have deleterious effects on cognitive control and performance. The traditional explanation is that stress reduces “cue utilisation”: It withdraws attentional resources from less relevant stimuli (including the distracter word), meaning that the target colour is left with a stronger influence over response selection. However, it could also be that stress somehow boosts distracter inhibition, or some other aspect of executive control. To test these two accounts, 59 students completed a Stroop task featuring occasional startlingly loud sounds (high stress) or the same sounds at a lower, comfortable volume (low stress). Alongside standard Stroop interference, two measures of executive control—negative priming and conflict adaptation—were calculated from the Stroop data. Stress produced a clear reduction of Stroop interference, but it did not influence negative priming, and no conflict adaptation effects were detected at all. These findings support the cue utilisation account. Furthermore, for the first time, stress was shown to reduce Stroop interference in a task with no congruent trials, showing that the effect does not result from stress’s modulating any strategy changes participants might make in response to congruent trials.

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Stroop Interference Based on the Synaesthetic Qualities of Auditory Pitch

Perception ◽

10.1068/p130075 ◽

1984 ◽

Vol 13 (1) ◽

pp. 75-81 ◽

Cited By ~ 45

Author(s):

Peter Walker ◽

Sylvia Smith

Keyword(s):

Cognitive Psychology ◽

Perceptual Experience ◽

Test Word ◽

Word Meaning ◽

Stroop Interference ◽

Decision Processes ◽

Human Information Processing ◽

Main Experiment ◽

Sensory Modalities ◽

Identification Decision

The equivalence of perceptual experience across the sensory modalities, most vividly observed in synaesthetes, is rarely discussed in contemporary cognitive psychology. It is suggested, however, that the concepts and paradigms of human information processing are ideally suited to test, for example, the fundamental assumption that the synaesthetic qualities of a stimulus are rapidly and automatically encoded. In a preliminary experiment subjects were asked to rate each of four auditory tones on a series of 7-point scales defined by pairs of antonyms. The results confirmed that a pure auditory tone has a range of qualities, determined by its pitch, that are shared by stimuli in other modalities. The main experiment used a paradigm based on the Stroop interference effect. Here the 50 Hz and 5500 Hz tones served as incidental stimuli and the subjects were required to respond as quickly as possible by pressing one of two keys depending on which one of four possible words appeared in the centre of the screen. Subjects were found to respond more slowly when the qualities of the tone were incongruent with the synaesthetic qualities represented by the test word. The results confirm that synaesthetic qualities of pitch are rapidly and automatically encoded and that the products of this encoding automatically interact with the mechanisms responsible for identifying word meaning and/or with the post-identification decision processes.

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