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...

Although researchers have studied employee lateness empirically (e.g., S. Adler & J. Golan, 1981; C. W. Clegg, 1983), few have attempted to describe the punctual employee. In the present study, results of a discriminant analysis on employees in Israel indicated that a personality characteristic, time urgency, a subcomponent of Type A behavioral pattern, distinguished between punctual and late employees. Organizational commitment and age of employee's youngest child also distinguished between the groups.

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The probability distribution of the length of time which is lost to an organization due to an employee being late arrival at work, as well as the correlation between the time lost in different incidents and on different dates is empirically studied. Computerized arrival records of the employees in the headquarters of a large industrial firm were used. It is shown that the probability of the time lost in a single late arrival follows a power law with an exponent α ~ 1 for lateness incidents longer than a few minutes but significantly shorter than the duration of a shift. It is also shown that the autocorrelations for time series composed of lateness incidents of different employees on different dates show a characteristic 1/fβ with β = 0.55 power spectrum. These results are a strong evidence for a kind of "critical dynamics" underlying the tardiness problem. On the other hand, the distribution of the total time lost in the organization due to late arrivals on a particular day is Gaussian.

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