A Stroop Effect for Spatial Orientation

Abstract

The author investigated the conditions under which a congruent or incongruent orientation word affects processing of the orientation of visual objects. Participants named the orientation of a rectangle that partially occluded another rectangle. Congruent or incongruent orientation words appeared in the relevant object, in the irrelevant object, or in the background. There were two main results. First, congruent orientation words produced faster orientation-naming responses than incongruent orientation words. This finding constituted a new Stroop effect for spatial orientation. Second, only words in the relevant (i.e., attended) object produced Stroop effects, whereas words outside the relevant object had no significant effects. This object-dependent modulation of Stroop effects resembled previous findings with color-naming tasks, and hence indicated that these modulations are not restricted to a particular type of task. In summary, results suggested that object-based attention plays an important role in processing of irrelevant words.

Inhibition is picky: Shape difference is a necessary condition for attentional inhibition of irrelevant objects

“…Using displays with crossed rectangles, Wühr and colleagues consistently found that words that were in the relevant object produced larger Stroop effects than did words that were in the irrelevant object or words that were in the background, whereas Stroop effects did not differ in the two latter conditions (Wühr, 2007;Wühr & Waszak, 2003;Wühr & Weltle, 2005). These results suggest that object-based attention amplifies the processing of the relevant object but does not inhibit the processing of the irrelevant object.…”

Auditory Stroop Using Spatial Stimuli

“…He noted that while females may sometimes respond faster than males (especially in color-naming tasks), it is the result of women having a faster general response speed and was not influenced by any measure of interference, and concluded that there was no difference in Stroop interference between sexes at any age. The visual-spatial Stroop study performed by Wühr [12] used a participant demographic nearly identical to the current study (19 females, 3 males, mean age = 21 years). Like our study, performance differences according to gender was not an objective of his study, and he did not report any findings or discussion points related to gender differences.…”

“…There are a number of appealing interference tasks that might address questions posed by this study. A visual-spatial Stroop task performed by Wühr [12] examined how the spatial orientation of rectangles containing congruent or incongruent semantic orientation words affected participants' ability to process the visual stimuli. Wühr found that the Stroop effect was present in this novel task which extended Stroop interference effects to the combined visual-spatial modality.…”

Effects of Stress on Preferences, Beliefs, and Constraints

“…Executive function refers to "a set of inter-related higher-order cognitive abilities involved in self-regulatory functions" [17] such as insight, judgement, working memory, or planning [18,1,20] ). We measured executive function using a 3 minute spatial version of the Stroop task, using congruent and incongruent directional signals (arrows) rather than words [21] . On each screen, participants saw a colored arrow that pointed either left or right, and responded by pressing a box on the left or right side of the screen.…”

“…We expect the results from the spatial Stroop task to exhibit the "Stroop effect:" participants should take longer, on average, to select the correct direction for incongruent stimuli (MacLeod, 1991), and/or make more mistakes (Wühr, 2007). Since our task is time-incentivized, participants may attempt to answer the incongruent items equally quickly and therefore sacrifice accuracy.…”