The stroop effect: It is not the robust phenomenon that you have thought it to be

Abstract

Five experiments demonstrate that context has a powerful effect on the ease with which people can name (Experiments 1-3) or categorize (Experiments 4-5) a stimulus while ignoring another stimulus, irrelevant or conflicting with the target. Selectivity of attention to the target dimension was gauged through Stroop and Garner effects, When the stimulus values along the target dimension and the to-beignored dimension were correlated over the experimental trials, large effects of Stroop and Garner influenced performance. However, when random allocation of values created zero dimensional correlation, the Stroop effects vanished, These results imply that when the nominally irrelevant dimension is in fact correlated with the relevant dimension, participants then attend to the irrelevant dimension and thus open themselves up to Stroop interference, Another variable of context, the relative salience of the constituent dimensions, also affected performance with the more discriminable dimension disrupting selective attention to the less discriminable dimension, The results demonstrate the importance of context in engendering the failure of selective attention and challenge traditional automaticity accounts of the Stroop effect.The Stroop effect (Stroop, 1935) is the demonstration of choice used by instructors of psychology to illustrate the failure of selective attention: Naming the print color of color words is impaired by the meaning of the words, although reading the words is not similarly hindered by irrelevant print color, The tenacity ofthe asymmetry in interference has earned the phenomenon more than classroom popularity, The Stroop effect has accrued theoretical interest because, presumably, the effect is the inescapable outcome of pitting the automatic process of word reading against the less automatic, or controlled, process ofcolor naming. The mandatory failure of selective attention to color naming ensues, Consequently, the Stroop effect has been considered to be the "gold standard" of attentional processing (MacLeod, 1992), The notions ofautomaticity (Hasher & Zacks, 1979;Kahneman & Treisman, 1984;Logan, 1980;Logan & Zbrodoff, 1998) and relative speed of processing (e.g, Dunbar & MacLeod, 1984;Posner, 1978) have indeed served to explain the Stroop phenomenon: Because word reading is more automatic and speedy than color naming, color naming suffers intrusions from involuntary word reading, but reading is not hampered by conflicting print color, More than 60 years after its discovery, the Stroop phenomenon continues to fascinate investigators and has sustained a substantial amount of research (see MacLeod, 1991, for a comprehensive review).In the present study, we challenge both the alleged robustness of the Stroop phenomenon and its traditional explanations. We demonstrate that the effect is malleable experimentally by several heretofore neglected stimulus factors, By judiciously manipulating these factors, one is able to determine the direction, the magnitude, and in fact, the very appearance of the Stroop eff...

Semantic processing of Arabic, Kanji, and Kana numbers: Evidence from interference in physical and numerical size judgments

“…Algom and colleagues pointed out that factors associated with the stimulus can produce interference or facilitation in Garner and Stroop-like paradigms (e.g., Algom et al, 1996;Dishow-Berkovits & Algom, 2000;Pansky & Algom, 1999;Pansky & Algom, 2002). For instance, Pansky and Algom (1999) demonstrated that larger Stroop effects could be observed with a manyvalued irrelevant dimension than with a binary-valued irrelevant dimension.…”

The hot-hand fallacy in cognitive control: Repetition expectancy modulates the congruency sequence effect

“…1B). As Mordkoff (2012) argued, increasing the proportion of congruent trials makes the irrelevant task dimension (i.e., the color word in the Stroop task) informative (see also Dishon-Berkovits & Algom, 2000). As a consequence, participants might have been encouraged to pay more attention to the distractor word.…”

Contrasting reactive and proactive control of emotional distraction.

“…These frequency effects are analogous to those seen in other types of conflict tasks, such as traditional Stroop or flanker tasks, in which the distracting information shares features with the target and so can create response conflict. In such tasks, performance improves when the proportion of conflict trials increases -an effect that has been attributed to increased cognitive control when conflicts are expected (Botvinick, Braver, Barch, Carter, & Cohen, 2001;Dishon-Berkovits & Algom, 2000; see reviews in Bugg, 2012;Bugg & Crump, 2012). The Dual Mechanisms of Control (DMC) model (Braver, 2012;Braver, Gray & Burgess, 2007;Braver, Paxton, Locke, & Barch, 2009) provides a useful framework in which to interpret the effect of distractor frequency on cognitive control.…”