Attentional Reorientation and Inhibition Adjustment in a Verbal Stroop Task: A Lifespan Approach to Interference and Sequential Congruency Effect

Abstract

Several parameters influence the interference effect elicited in a Stroop task, especially contextual information. Contextual effects in the Stroop paradigms are known as the Gratton or Sequential congruency effect (SCE). This research aims at isolating two processes contributing to the SCE in a Stroop paradigm, namely attentional reorientation from the color to the word and vice-versa, as well as inhibition (engagement/disengagement from one trial to the next one). To this end, in Study 1 subprocesses of the SCE were isolated. Specifically, attentional reorientation and inhibition were segregated by submitting young adults to a discrete verbal Stroop task including neutral trials. In Study 2, the same procedure was applied to 124 participants aged from 10 to 80 years old to analyze how interference, SCE, and the aforementioned decomposition of attention and inhibition change across the lifespan. In both studies, the Gratton effect was only partially replicated, while both attentional reorientation and inhibition effects were observed, supporting the idea that these two processes contribute to SCE on top of conflict monitoring and of other processes highlighted in different theories (contingency learning, feature integration, and repetition expectancy). Finally, the classical age-related evolution was replicated in Study 2 on raw interference scores, but no age effect was observed when processing speed was taken into account, nor on the isolated attentional reorientation and inhibition processes, which is in line with the hypothesis of stability of the inhibition processes over age.

The temporal dynamics of the Stroop effect from childhood to young and older adulthood

“…Another explanation might be related to the structure of the task. Since initially this task was designed to investigate the conflict adaptation effect [40], up to three repetitions of the same condition were allowed. Subjects might have benefit from this feature to anticipate the presence of a conflict in the next item.…”

“…The participants were part of a larger group from which only the behavioral data has been analyzed in previous study [40].…”

“…The entire procedure was approved by the local Ethics Committee. The participants were part of a larger group from which only the behavioral data has been analyzed in previous study [40].…”

“…The general slowing hypothesis explains the longer latencies in aging by a slowdown of all processes. The decline could then simply be explained by a decrease in attentional resources but a stability of the inhibition abilities [38][39][40][41][42]. Applied to the Stroop task, this would imply that both stimulus and response conflicts are impacted in the same way by aging, since all implicated cognitive processes are slowed down to compensate the needed increased effort.…”

Development and Testing of a Modified Version of Stroop Test for the Assessment of Sexual Functioning: A Modified Sexual Stroop Test in Persian Language (MSST-Persian)

“…It has been suggested that the task of focusing on the "right" answer in a conflictual situation is related to a part of the brain called anterior cingulate, a region located in the frontal lobe. It is involved in many higher cortical processes including attention and executive functioning (Banich, 2019;Ménétré & Laganaro, 2019).…”