Two experiments are reported in which the role of attribute exposure duration in naming performance was examined by tracking eye movements. Participants were presented with color-word Stroop stimuli and left-or right-pointing arrows on different sides of a computer screen. They named the color attribute and shifted their gaze to the arrow to manually indicate its direction. The color attribute (Experiment 1) or the complete color-word stimulus (Experiment 2) was removed from the screen 100 ms after stimulus onset. Compared with presentation until trial offset, removing the color attribute diminished Stroop interference, as well as facilitation effects in color naming latencies, whereas removing the complete stimulus diminished interference only. Attribute and stimulus removal reduced the latency of gaze shifting, which suggests decreased rather than increased attentional demand. These results provide evidence that limiting exposure duration contributes to attribute naming performance by diminishing the extent to which irrelevant attributes are processed, which reduces attentional demand.Keywords: attention, exposure duration, eye movements, naming, Stroop Attention in attribute naming performance has been studied extensively by using one of the most widely employed tasks in academic and applied psychology, the color-word Stroop task (Stroop, 1935). In a commonly used version of this task, participants name the color attribute of colored congruent or incongruent color words (e.g., the words GREEN or RED in green ink, respectively; say "green") or neutral series of Xs. Response time (RT) in Stroop task performance is longer in the incongruent than the neutral condition, descriptively called interference, and often shorter in the congruent than the neutral condition, descriptively called facilitation (for reviews, see Glaser & Glaser, 1989;MacLeod, 1991).Since the beginning of experimental psychology, researchers have examined the influence of signal exposure duration on human performance (e.g., Wundt, 1900; see Woodworth, 1938, for a review of the early literature). More recent research has demonstrated that attribute exposure duration influences how quickly attributes are named in the Stroop task, as reflected in the mean RTs. When the color attribute of the color-word Stroop stimuli is removed (i.e., changed into neutral white color on a dark computer screen) 120 or 160 ms after stimulus presentation onset (e.g., RED in green ink is changed into RED in neutral white ink), the magnitude of Stroop interference is reduced compared with the standard continuous presentation of the color until trial offset (La Whereas the only stimulus attribute present on the screen for most of the trial is an incongruent word, Stroop interference is less. The finding can be explained, however, if one assumes that removing the color attribute hampers the grouping of the color and word attributes into one perceptual object (i.e., a colored word) to which visual attention is allocated (cf. Kahneman & Henik, 1981;La Heij et al., 2001;. ...
