Strategies that reduce Stroop interference

A remarkable example of reducing Stroop interference is provided by the word blindness post-hypnotic suggestion (a suggestion to see words as meaningless during the Stroop task). This suggestion has been repeatedly demonstrated to halve Stroop interference when it is given to highly hypnotisable individuals. In order to explore how highly hypnotisable people manage to reduce Stroop interference when they respond to the word blindness suggestion, we tested four candidate strategies in two experiments outside of the hypnotic context. A strategy of looking-away from the target words, and a strategy of visual blurring demonstrated compelling evidence for substantially reducing Stroop interference in both experiments. However, the pattern of results produced by these strategies did not match those of the word blindness suggestion. Crucially, neither looking-away nor visual blurring managed to speed up incongruent responses, suggesting that neither of these strategies are likely underlying mechanisms of the word blindness suggestion. Although the current results did not unravel the mystery of the word blindness suggestion, they showed that there are multiple voluntary ways through which participants can dramatically reduce Stroop interference.

Does unconscious control depend on conflict?

Unravelling the mechanisms that trigger cognitive control is a central question in cognitive science. Cognitive conflict is closely associated with the activation of cognitive control, helping individuals to follow their own goals. In this study, we examined whether the association of conflict and control holds when people are not aware of their intentions (i.e., they experience involuntariness regarding their behaviours). To induce unconscious control, we employed a posthypnotic suggestion (word blindness: that words will appear as a meaningless foreign script) on highly suggestible participants, a manipulation which has previously been shown to halve the Stroop interference effect. To alter the amount of conflict, we manipulated the proportion of incongruent, congruent and neutral Stroop trials between blocks in two experiments. The analyses revealed that the Stroop effect was reduced by the suggestion in the high conflict conditions (conditions with 33% or more incongruent trials), and barely at all in the low conflict conditions (conditions with 10% incongruent trials) compared to no suggestion conditions, thus, supporting the idea that a certain amount of conflict is required to activate unconscious control. This finding can also be interpreted in light of the two competing accounts of the word blindness effect (de-automatisation of reading and response competition models). The results imply that conflict between the response options occurs even in the suggestion condition and so the word blindness suggestion does not influence semantic processing as the de-automatisation of reading account postulates, rather, it is more likely that the suggestion facilitates the reduction of response competition.

“Word Blindness” (Dyslexia) : A Bibliometric Analysis of Global Research in Last Fifty Years

<div class="page" title="Page 1"><div class="layoutArea"><div class="column"><p><span>Dyslexia (commonly known as word blindness) is a cognitive (learning) disorder characterised by an impaired ability to comprehend written and printed words or phrases despite of intact vision. A quantitative literature analysis was carried out on learning disorder - dyslexia from 1967 to 2016 (50 Year) for assessing the global research trends. The emphasis has been given to analyse the research progress in dyslexia using bibliometric methods. This literature-based study was carried out with the documents retrieved from the Scopus. There were 13455 articles on Dyslexia in SCOPUS, distributed in nine document types and twenty eight languages. These literature were grown at 6 per cent annually. Of ninety eight countries, USA shared highest contribution. India ranked 20th in terms of total publication. The most of the research areas are centered towards psychology, learning ability and linguistics. </span></p></div></div></div>