Think the thought, walk the walk – Social priming reduces the Stroop effect

In the Stroop task, participants name the color of the ink that a color word is written in and ignore the meaning of the word. Naming the color of an incongruent color word (e.g., RED printed in blue) is slower than naming the color of a congruent color word (e.g., RED printed in red). This robust effect is known as the Stroop effect and it suggests that the intentional instruction - "do not read the word" - has limited influence on one's behavior, as word reading is being executed via an automatic path. Herein is examined the influence of a non-intentional instruction - "do not read the word" - on the Stroop effect. Social concept priming tends to trigger automatic behavior that is in line with the primed concept. Here participants were primed with the social concept "dyslexia" before performing the Stroop task. Because dyslectic people are perceived as having reading difficulties, the Stroop effect was reduced and even failed to reach significance after the dyslectic person priming. A similar effect was replicated in a further experiment, and overall it suggests that the human cognitive system has more success in decreasing the influence of another automatic process via an automatic path rather than via an intentional path.

[1]  J. Bargh,et al.  Automaticity of social behavior: direct effects of trait construct and stereotype-activation on action. , 1996, Journal of personality and social psychology.

[2]  Colin M. Macleod.  Half a century of research on the Stroop effect: an integrative review. , 1991, Psychological bulletin.

[3]  A. Treisman,et al.  The Stroop Test: Selective Attention to Colours and Words , 1969, Nature.

[4]  D. Algom,et al.  Selective attention improves under stress: implications for theories of social cognition. , 2003, Journal of personality and social psychology.

[5]  H. Pashler.  STEVENS' HANDBOOK OF EXPERIMENTAL PSYCHOLOGY , 2002 .

[6]  L. Hasher,et al.  Automatic and effortful processes in memory. , 1979 .

[7]  Amir Raz,et al.  Hypnosis and neuroscience: a cross talk between clinical and cognitive research. , 2002, Archives of General Psychiatry.

[8]  J Tzelgov,et al.  Specifying the relations between automaticity and consciousness: a theoretical note. , 1997, Consciousness and cognition.

[9]  A. Lutz,et al.  Attention regulation and monitoring in meditation , 2008, Trends in Cognitive Sciences.

[10]  I. Kirsch,et al.  Suggestion Reduces the Stroop Effect , 2006, Psychological science.

[11]  A. Treisman.  Strategies and models of selective attention. , 1969, Psychological review.

[12]  Colin M. Macleod,et al.  Interdimensional interference in the Stroop effect: uncovering the cognitive and neural anatomy of attention , 2000, Trends in Cognitive Sciences.

[13]  James L. McClelland,et al.  On the control of automatic processes: a parallel distributed processing account of the Stroop effect. , 1990, Psychological review.

[14]  F H Durgin,et al.  The reverse Stroop effect , 2000, Psychonomic bulletin & review.

[15]  Translation and competition among internal representations in a reverse Stroop effect , 2003, Perception & psychophysics.

[16]  J. E. McDonald,et al.  Time course of inhibition in color-response and word-response versions of the Stroop task. , 1994, Journal of experimental psychology. Human perception and performance.

[17]  Jin Fan,et al.  Hypnotic suggestion reduces conflict in the human brain. , 2005, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America.

[18]  Colin M. Macleod,et al.  Training and Stroop-like interference: evidence for a continuum of automaticity. , 1988, Journal of experimental psychology. Learning, memory, and cognition.

[19]  J. Bargh.  Conditional automaticity: Varieties of automatic influence in social perception and cognition. , 1989 .

[20]  J. Stroop.  Studies of interference in serial verbal reactions. , 1992 .

[21]  E. C. Dalrymple-Alford,et al.  Examination of Some Aspects of the Stroop Color-Word Test , 1966, Perceptual and motor skills.

[22]  D. Wegner.  When the Antidote is the Poison: Ironic Mental Control Processes , 1997 .

[23]  A. van Knippenberg,et al.  The relation between perception and behavior, or how to win a game of trivial pursuit. , 1998, Journal of personality and social psychology.

[24]  Colin M. Macleod,et al.  American Psychological Association, Inc. A Horse Race of a Different Color: Stroop Interference Patterns With Transformed Words v , 2022 .

[25]  Avishai Henik,et al.  Induced Cross-Modal Synaesthetic Experience Without Abnormal Neuronal Connections , 2009, Psychological science.

[26]  A. Henik,et al.  Evidence for task conflict in the Stroop effect. , 2007, Journal of experimental psychology. Human perception and performance.

[27]  Edward E. Smith,et al.  Attention Enhances the Neural Processing of Relevant Features and Suppresses the Processing of Irrelevant Features in Humans: A Functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging Study of the Stroop Task , 2008, The Journal of Neuroscience.

[28]  Raja Parasuraman,et al.  Varieties of attention , 1984 .

[29]  D. Wegner.  Ironic processes of mental control. , 1994, Psychological review.

[30]  Jonathan D. Cohen,et al.  Progress in the use of interactive models for understanding attention and performance , 1994 .

[31]  G. Logan.  Attention and preattention in theories of automaticity. , 1992, The American journal of psychology.

[32]  M. Posner.  Chronometric explorations of mind , 1978 .

[33]  J. Bargh.  The ecology of automaticity: toward establishing the conditions needed to produce automatic processing effects. , 1992, The American journal of psychology.