Involuntary automatic processing in color-naming tasks

Regan, Joan E.

doi:10.3758/bf03199539

Cited by 61 publications

(77 citation statements)

References 14 publications

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“…Adding unrelated letters to the first letters did not alter interference, leading Singer et al to speculate that the interference stemmed from activation of a motor program to articulate the beginning of a word. Regan (1978) confirmed this initial-letter effect, also showing that the first letter could produce facilitation in the congruent case. She took this as evidence for automatic processing of letters and words.…”

Section: Acoustic Variationsupporting

confidence: 71%

“…McCown and Arnoult (1981) printed the stimuli vertically versus horizontally using either the entire color word or just its first three letters, and reported equivalent interference in all cases. Regan (1978) found interference even using only the first letter of a conflicting color word (e.g., the letter B in red ink). Nor do instructional manipulations have much impact.…”

Section: Variations On the Stroop Procedures The Stroop Color-word Intmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…In her dissertation, Regan (1979) obtained facilitation for congruent words and interference for neutral words; she also obtained facilitation using just the first letter of the correct color name (see also Regan, 1978). Yet turning the words upside down and backward to slow reading, Dunbar and MacLeod (1984) obtained little facilitation in the congruent condition despite huge interference in the incongruent condition.…”

Section: Congruency Effectsmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Half a century of research on the Stroop effect: An integrative review.

MacLeod

1991

Psychological Bulletin

4,725

165

3,607

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The literature on interference in the Stroop Color-Word Task, covering over 50 years and some 400 studies, is organized and reviewed. In so doing, a set ofl 8 reliable empirical findings is isolated that must be captured by any successful theory of the Stroop effect. Existing theoretical positions are summarized and evaluated in view of this critical evidence and the 2 major candidate theories--relative speed of processing and automaticity of reading--are found to be wanting. It is concluded that recent theories placing the explanatory weight on parallel processing of the irrelevant and the relevant dimensions are likely to be more successful than are earlier theories attempting to locate a single bottleneck in attention.In 1935, J. R. Stroop published his landmark article on attention and interference, an article more influential now than it was then. Why has the Stroop task continued to fascinate us? Perhaps the task is seen as tapping into the primitive operations of cognition, offering clues to the fundamental process of attention. Perhaps the robustness of the phenomenon provides a special challenge to decipher. Together these are powerful attractions in a field of complex phenomena where the most subtie variation may exert a dramatic effect.In writing this article, I have two primary intentions. The first is to create a taxonomy of the empirical work on the Stroop task and its analogs. At least 70% of the more than 700 Strooprelated articles in the literature have been published since the reviews by Dyer (1973c) and Jensen and Rohwer (1966). Furthermore, Dyer's theoretical framework now seems in need of reconsideration, so that his review no longer provides the optimal organization. The second aim, then, is to survey existing theories, showing the critical weaknesses in the standard explanations and dispelling some myths that have arisen. I argue for a new theoretical framework for the Stroop effect, informed by contemporary cognitive psychology. This framework is more comprehensive than many earlier experiment-specific hypotheses, and suggests directions in which future research might profitably proceed.

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Section: Acoustic Variationsupporting

confidence: 71%

Section: Variations On the Stroop Procedures The Stroop Color-word Intmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Congruency Effectsmentioning

confidence: 99%

See 1 more Smart Citation

Half a century of research on the Stroop effect: An integrative review.

MacLeod

1991

Psychological Bulletin

4,725

165

3,607

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“…First, Beech, Agar, and Baylis (1989) found that the Stroop effect from incongruent words disappears when compared with nonwords that share the first two letters with the incongruent word. In addition, other studies have reported that just the first two letters of an incongruent word are sufficient to produce interference effects (Bibi, Tzelgov, & Henik, in press;Coltheart, Woollams, Kinoshita, & Perry, 1999;Regan, 1978;Singer, Lappin, & Moore, 1975). From this, it appears that the absence ofa Stroop effect with this nonword condition is an expected pattern, rather than an exception.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 61%

Stroop interference and negative priming: Problems with inferences from null results

2000

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The Stroop color-naming effect has often been taken as evidence for the automaticity of word processing (MacLeod, 1991). Recently, Besner, Stolz, and Boutilier (1997) reported that coloring a single letter instead of the whole word eliminated the Stroop effect. From this finding, they concluded that word processing could not be purely automatic, since it can be prevented. Weasked whether the elimination of the Stroop effect is sufficient evidence for concluding that the word is not processed. Combining Besner et al.'s manipulation with a negative-primingprocedure, we found intact negative priming from the prime color word in the absence of a Stroop effect. This result clearly indicates that the meaning of the prime word was processed. The findings highlight the importance of using converging methods to evaluate lack of processing.In one of the most cited studies in experimental psychology, Stroop (1935) reported that participants take longer to name the color of an incongruent stimulus, such as the word BLUE printed in green ink, than to name the color of a neutral stimulus, such as a green square. The Stroop phenomenon is cited as strong evidence that word reading is automatic and cannot be prevented even when it is irrelevant for the task at hand (MacLeod, 1991).Recently, Besner, Stolz, and Boutilier (1997) compared the basic Stroop task, in which the whole word is colored, to a Stroop task in which only one of the letters is colored. They found that in the single-letter condition, the Stroop effect was either reduced (Experiment I) or eliminated (Experiment 2), and they concluded that this result demonstrates the nonautomatic nature of word reading, stating that Nonetheless, as the present experiments show, at least some of these putatively automatic reading processes can be interfered with so that the Stroop effect is reduced ... , and even eliminated .... The ability to produce this outcome would seem to fly in the face of any automaticity ac-P.M.-B. was supported by a postdoctoral grant from Ministerio de Educacion y Cultura (Spain). We also thank Steve Tipper, Derek Besner, and Bruce Milliken for their helpful comments and suggestions. This work represents equal and shared contributions by the authors. Correspondence concerning this article should be sent to P. Mari-Beffa or to S. Danziger, School of Psychology, University of Wales, Bangor, Gwynedd LL57 2DG, Wales (e-mail: pbeffa@bangor. ac.uk, mafernan@ualm.es, or s.danziger@bangor.ac.uk).count in which specified processes cannot be prevented from being initiated. (Besner et al., 1997, p. 224) In the present study, we asked whether the absence of a Stroop effect necessarily implies a lack of Stroop word processing. The logic behind our concern with Besner et al.'s (1997) conclusion was that although one can argue for word processing if a Stroop effect is found, one cannot validly infer a lack of word processing from the absence ofa Stroop effect. In essence Besner et al. base their argument on a lack of an effect, and one must always be cautious when...

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“…This constraint could not be perfectly met. Care was taken, however, that none of the words had the same initial letter as the verbal label of the accompanying picture (for the importance of the first letter, see, e.g., Lupker, 1982;Posnansky & Rayner, 1977;Regan, 1978;and Singer, Lappin, & Moore, 1975). (3) In the distractor conditions, RELlNRS and UNRlNRS pictures were not to be combined with words that denote objects that show a large visual similarity to the target picture.…”

Section: Methodsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Components of Stroop-like interference in picture naming

1988

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The semantic interference effect observed in Stroop tasks and picture-word interference tasks might be due to the previous confounding of semantic similarity with task relevance (in the Stroop task) and with perceptual similarity (in the picture-word interference task). A picture-word variant ofthe Stroop task was devised in which the factors of task relevance and perceptual similarity were controlled. The distractor conditions allowed for the examination of four types of context effects. The results show that the overall Stroop-like interference effect can be decomposed into interference effects due to (1) a semantic relation between distractor and target, (2) the semantic relevance of the distractor word in the task at hand, (3) the presence of the distractor word in the response set, and (4) the mere presence of a word. Implications of these findings for the locus or loci of Stroop and picture-word interference effects are discussed. It is concluded that distractor words in Stroop-like naming tasks interfere mainly in the process of name retrieval.In the Stroop task, subjects are required to name colors that are part of, or accompanied by, a printed word (see, e.g., Glaser & Glaser, 1982;Stroop, 1935); in the picture-word interference task, subjects are required to name pictures that are accompanied by a printed word (see, e.g., Rosinski, Golinkoff, & Kukish, 1975;Underwood, 1976). In the Stroop task (see, e.g., Fox, Shor, & Steinman, 1971;Klein, 1964), and in the picture-word interference task (see, e.g., Glaser & Diingelhoff, 1984;Guttentag & Haith, 1978;Lupker, 1979;Rosinski, 1977), a distractor word that is semantically related to the target seems to induce more interference than a distractor word that is unrelated to the target. This semantic interference effect stands in marked contrast to the semantic facilitation effect observed in tasks in which subjects are required to read a target word that is preceded by, or presented simultaneously with, a prime word (e.g., Dallas & Merikle, 1976; La Heij, Van der Heijden, & Schreuder, 1985;Warren, 1977).A conclusion that could be drawn from these results is that a semantic relation between a distractor word (or prime word) and a target will hamper performance in tasks in which nonverbal targets have to be named (as in the Stroop task and the picture-word interference task) but will facilitate perfonnance in tasks in which verbal targets have to be read (as in the word-reading variant of the semantic priming task). Before accepting such a conclusion, it would seem worthwhile to determine whether the discrepancy can be attributed to other characteristics of the various tasks.Further inspection of the Stroop task and the pictureword interference task reveals that in both of these tasks the semantic relatedness factor is confounded with another Requests for reprints should be sent to W. La Heij, Department of Psychology, Unit of Experimental Psychology, University of Leiden, Hooigracht 15,2312 KM Leiden, The Netherlands. factor that might be responsible for the int...

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Involuntary automatic processing in color-naming tasks

Cited by 61 publications

References 14 publications

Half a century of research on the Stroop effect: An integrative review.

Half a century of research on the Stroop effect: An integrative review.

Stroop interference and negative priming: Problems with inferences from null results

Components of Stroop-like interference in picture naming

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