The stroop effect and the myth of automaticity

Abstract

A widespread view in cognition is that once acquired through extensive practice, mental skills such as reading are automatic. Lexical and semantic analyses of single words are said to be uncontrollable in the sense that they cannot be prevented. Over the past 60 years, apparently convincing support for this assumption has come from hundreds of experiments in which skilled readers have processed an irrelevant word in the Stroop task despite explicit instructions not to, even when so doing would hurt color identification performance. This basic effect was replicated in two experiments, which also showed that a considerable amount of semantic processing is locally controlled by elements of the task. For example, simply coloring a single letter instead of the whole word eliminated the Stroop effect. This outcome flies in the face of any automaticity account in which specified processes cannot be prevented from being set in motion, but it is consistent with the venerable idea that mental set is a powerful determinant of performance. 221Many low-level human behaviors are automatic, in that a stimulus serves to elicit the behavior in the absence of conscious awareness or intention (e.g., an eye blink in response to a puff of air; the patellar reflex; the Babinski reflex), Learned behaviors such as reading are also widely argued to be automatic in a similar sense. For example, it is well established that identifying the color of an incongruent word (e.g., green letters spelling the word "red") is slower than identifying the color of a congruent word (e.g., green letters spelling the word "green"). This Stroop effect (Stroop, 1935) and its many variants have been explored empirically, theoretically, and computationally by cognitive and developmental psychologists, psycholinguists, neuropsychologists, and cognitive scientists in more than 500 papers over the past 60 years (see MacLeod's 1991 review). A core assumption of virtually all the theoretical accounts is that skilled readers process the irrelevant word without consciousness or intent. Reading the word is said to be automatic in the sense that readers cannot refrain from computing the meaning of the word despite explicit instructions not to do SO:I Reading is such an automatic process that it is difficult to inhibit and it will interfere with processing other information about the word.

Divided attention modulates semantic activation: Evidence from a nonletter-level prime task

“…In summary, these results suggest that semantic activation is critically modulated by the amount of attentional resources allocated to the prime word, and that auditory divided attention affects the processing from the word level to the semantic level, consistent with numerous studies of visual word recognition (e.g., Besner, Stolz, & Boutilier, 1997;Chiappe et al, 1996;Smith & Besner, 2001;Stolz & Besner, 1996). In addition, the difference in pattern between semantic priming and repetition priming permits us to reject other explanations for our results, such as the idea that the high divided-attention condition caused spreading activation to decay more rapidly than did the other conditions or that tone decision delayed target responding so that spreading activation from a fully activated prime word decayed prior to target responding.…”

A change of task prolongs early processes: Evidence from ERPs in lexical tasks.

“…Although Besner and colleagues (Besner et al, 1997(Besner et al, , 2009) have argued for the automaticity of at least early stages of lexical identification, others have demonstrated substantial modulation of ERP and priming indices of lexical or semantic activation as a function of a concurrent or preceding task (Kiefer & Martens, 2010;Lien, Ruthruff, Cornett, Godin, & Allen, 2008;Rabovsky, Alvarez, Hohlfeld, & Sommer, 2008;Vachon & Jolicoeur, 2011). Our own findings seem to be on a continuum with the latter group of studies.…”

Semantic activation in action planning.

“…Similarly, Stroop interference can be reduced or eliminated when only a single letter is colored instead of the whole word, as in the standard version of the task (Besner, Stolz, & Boutilier, 1997). In both tasks, allocating attention to low-level features of the word is assumed to hinder semantic processing.…”