Depth of processing in the stroop task: evidence from a novel forced-reading condition.

The presence of the Stroop effect betrays the fact that the carrier words were read in the face of instructions to ignore them and to respond to the target ink colors. In this study, we probed the nature of this involuntary reading by comparing color performance with that in a new forced-reading Stroop task in which responding is strictly contingent on reading each and every word. We found larger Stroop effects in the forced-reading task than in the classic Stroop task and concluded that words are processed to a shallower level in the Stroop task than they are in routine voluntary reading. The results show that the two modes of word processing differ in systematic ways and are conductive to qualitatively different representations. These results can pose a challenge to the strongly automatic view of word reading in the Stroop task.

[1]  D. Besner,et al.  Single letter coloring and spatial cuing eliminates a semantic contribution to the Stroop effect , 2004, Psychonomic bulletin & review.

[2]  S. Brown,et al.  A critical test of the failure-to-engage theory of task switching , 2006, Psychonomic bulletin & review.

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

[4]  James R. Schmidt,et al.  The Stroop effect: why proportion congruent has nothing to do with congruency and everything to do with contingency. , 2008, Journal of experimental psychology. Learning, memory, and cognition.

[5]  Keith A Hutchison,et al.  Converging evidence for control of color-word Stroop interference at the item level. , 2013, Journal of experimental psychology. Human perception and performance.

[6]  G. Dell,et al.  Lexical access in aphasic and nonaphasic speakers. , 1997, Psychological review.

[7]  Colin M. Macleod,et al.  The stroop task : the «Gold Standard» of attentional measures , 1992 .

[8]  G. S. Klein,et al.  SEMANTIC POWER MEASURED THROUGH THE INTERFERENCE OF WORDS WITH COLOR-NAMING. , 1964, The American journal of psychology.

[9]  James T. Townsend,et al.  Comparing perception of Stroop stimuli in focused versus divided attention paradigms: Evidence for dramatic processing differences , 2010, Cognition.

[10]  G. Logan.  Toward an instance theory of automatization. , 1988 .

[11]  M Coltheart,et al.  DRC: a dual route cascaded model of visual word recognition and reading aloud. , 2001, Psychological review.

[12]  Andrew Heathcote,et al.  ChoiceKey: A real-time speech recognition program for psychology experiments with a small response set , 2009, Behavior research methods.

[13]  Ami Eidels,et al.  Independent race of colour and word can predict the Stroop effect , 2012 .

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

[15]  L. Jacoby,et al.  Stroop process dissociations: the relationship between facilitation and interference. , 1994, Journal of experimental psychology. Human perception and performance.

[16]  C. Davis.  N-Watch: A program for deriving neighborhood size and other psycholinguistic statistics , 2005, Behavior research methods.

[17]  Derek Besner,et al.  The stroop effect and the myth of automaticity , 1997, Psychonomic bulletin & review.

[18]  A. Roelofs,et al.  Goal-referenced selection of verbal action: modeling attentional control in the Stroop task. , 2003, Psychological review.

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

[20]  James T. Townsend,et al.  The Stochastic Modeling of Elementary Psychological Processes , 1983 .

[21]  Matthew A Lambon Ralph,et al.  What’s in a word? A parametric study of semantic influences on visual word recognition , 2012, Psychonomic Bulletin & Review.

[22]  Daniel Algom,et al.  Comparative judgment of numerosity and numerical magnitude: attention preempts automaticity. , 2002, Journal of experimental psychology. Learning, memory, and cognition.

[23]  M Coltheart,et al.  A position-sensitive stroop effect: Further evidence for a left-to-right component in print-to-speech conversion , 1999, Psychonomic bulletin & review.

[24]  T. Chartrand,et al.  THE UNBEARABLE AUTOMATICITY OF BEING , 1999 .

[25]  A. Henik,et al.  Is three greater than five: The relation between physical and semantic size in comparison tasks , 1982, Memory & cognition.

[26]  Daniel Algom,et al.  The stroop effect: It is not the robust phenomenon that you have thought it to be , 2000, Memory & cognition.

[27]  D. Balota,et al.  Individual differences in information-processing rate and amount: implications for group differences in response latency. , 1999, Psychological bulletin.

[28]  D. Algom,et al.  Driven by information: a tectonic theory of Stroop effects. , 2003, Psychological review.

[29]  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.

[30]  Thomas H Carr,et al.  Visual attention and word recognition in stroop color naming: is word recognition "automatic"? , 2002, Journal of experimental psychology. General.

[31]  Dana Ganor-Stern,et al.  Automaticity of two-digit numbers. , 2007, Journal of experimental psychology. Human perception and performance.

[32]  J. Rouder,et al.  Default Bayes Factors for Model Selection in Regression , 2012, Multivariate behavioral research.

[33]  D. Algom,et al.  Stroop and Garner effects in comparative judgment of numerals: The role of attention. , 1999 .

[34]  Z. Dienes,et al.  A theory of implicit and explicit knowledge , 1999, Behavioral and Brain Sciences.

[35]  D. Kahneman,et al.  Tests of the automaticity of reading: dilution of Stroop effects by color-irrelevant stimuli. , 1983, Journal of experimental psychology. Human perception and performance.

[36]  F. Craik,et al.  Levels of Pro-cessing: A Framework for Memory Research , 1975 .

[37]  R. Duncan Luce,et al.  Response Times: Their Role in Inferring Elementary Mental Organization , 1986 .

[38]  D. Algom,et al.  Stroop and Garner effects in and out of Posner's beam: reconciling two conceptions of selective attention. , 2000, Journal of experimental psychology. Human perception and performance.

[39]  Lisa Geraci,et al.  Processing approaches to cognition: The impetus from the levels-of-processing framework , 2002, Memory.

[40]  D. Dulany,et al.  Conscious Representation and Thought Systems , 1991 .

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

[42]  G D Logan,et al.  Constraints on strategy construction in a speeded discrimination task. , 1982, Journal of experimental psychology. Human perception and performance.

[43]  D. Algom,et al.  The perception of number from the separability of the stimulus: The Stroop effect revisited , 1996, Memory & cognition.

[44]  Jonathan W. Schooler,et al.  Scientific Approaches to Consciousness , 1997 .

[45]  J. Regan,et al.  Involuntary automatic processing in color-naming tasks , 1978, Perception & psychophysics.