Visual attention and word recognition in Stroop color naming: Is word recognition "automatic?"

Brown, Tracy L.; Gore, Crystal; Carr, Thomas H.

doi:10.1037/0096-3445.131.2.220

Cited by 130 publications

(196 citation statements)

References 76 publications

Supporting

Mentioning

186

Contrasting

Order By: Relevance

“…In addition, our task did not manipulate response congruencies or incongruencies (MacLeod, 1991) in that font colors were irrelevant to the emotional categorizations to be made. Although Stroop-related facilitation effects have been observed, none of the relevant mechanisms proposed -inadvertent reading processes (Kane & Engle, 2003), convergence of sources of information (Melara & Algom, 2003), or lexicality costs (Brown, Gore, & Carr, 2002) can be viewed as relevant to our results. We manipulated font colors and reading processes are thus irrelevant.…”

Section: Task Considerationsmentioning

confidence: 82%

Anger as “seeing red”: Evidence for a perceptual association

Fetterman

Robinson

Meier

2012

Cognition & Emotion

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

Metaphor representation theory contends that people conceptualize their non-perceptual states (e.g., emotion concepts) in perceptual terms. The present research extends this theory to color manipulations and discrete emotional representations. Two experiments (N = 265) examined whether a red font color would facilitate anger conceptions, consistent with metaphors referring to anger to "seeing red". Evidence for an implicit anger-red association was robust and emotionally discrete in nature. Further, Experiment 2 examined the directionality of such associations and found that they were asymmetrical: Anger categorizations were faster when a red font color was involved, but redness categorizations were not faster when an anger-related word was involved. Implications for multiple literatures are discussed.

show abstract

Section: Task Considerationsmentioning

confidence: 82%

Anger as “seeing red”: Evidence for a perceptual association

Fetterman

Robinson

Meier

2012

Cognition & Emotion

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

show abstract

“…However, we wondered if it was possible that the presentation of the Task 2 word disrupted processing of the tone and that this was what caused RT1 to increase with decreasing SOA. There is some evidence from the Stroop literature that indicates that words are read involuntarily (Brown, Gore, & Carr, 2002), and it is possible that this involuntary allocation of attention to the word disrupted tone processing. As the SOA is decreased, it becomes more likely that tone processing is still underway when the Task 2 word is presented, which makes disruption more likely when the SOA is short.…”

Section: The Central Bottleneck Model With Disruptionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Testing the Predictions of the Central Capacity Sharing Model.

Tombu

Jolicœur

2005

Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception and Perfor

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

The divergent predictions of 2 models of dual-task performance are investigated. The central bottleneck and central capacity sharing models argue that a central stage of information processing is capacity limited, whereas stages before and after are capacity free. The models disagree about the nature of this central capacity limitation. The central bottleneck model claims that central processing acts on only 1 task at a time and, therefore, constitutes a bottleneck that processes tasks serially. The central capacity sharing model postulates that the central stage is a limited-capacity parallel processor that divides resources among to-be-performed tasks. As a result of this difference, in the psychological refractory period paradigm, the central capacity sharing model predicts that lengthening Task 2 precentral processing will improve Task 1 performance at short stimulus onset asynchronies, whereas the central bottleneck model does not. Results of 2 experiments confirm the prediction of the central capacity sharing model.Keywords: capacity sharing, information processing, dual-task, psychological refractory period (PRP), attention Researchers have known for over 70 years that when people are required to perform two tasks in rapid succession, performance on one or both of these tasks suffers. This phenomenon is known as dual-task interference, and it can be striking and severe. Although the human brain is a powerful information processing device, the observation of dual-task interference indicates a performance limit on what the brain can do. Much research has been conducted exploring dual-task interference, but the source of this limitation continues to be debated. The Psychological Refractory Period ParadigmIn 1931, Telford developed the psychological refractory period (PRP) paradigm to explore dual-task performance. The paradigm has since been used extensively (DeJong, 1993(DeJong, , 1995McCann & Johnston, 1992;Pashler, 1991Pashler, , 1994Pashler & Johnston, 1989;Smith, 1967;Welford, 1952). In the PRP paradigm, subjects perform two tasks in rapid succession. On each trial, two stimuli are presented, each of which requires its own speeded response. The tasks that are used generally do not take long to perform (typically less than 1 s when performed alone) and can seem trivial when performed in isolation. The temporal gap between the onsets of the two stimuli-the stimulus onset asynchrony (SOA)-is varied, and reaction time (RT) and accuracy are measured. As the SOA is shortened, a dramatic limitation in information processing is revealed. At long SOAs, performance on both tasks approaches single-task performance. However, as the SOA is decreased, performance on the second task becomes increasingly worse. At the shortest SOAs, RTs to the second task (RT2s) are often several hundred milliseconds longer than they are at long SOAs. At sufficiently short SOAs, the slope of the RT2 curve (as a function of SOA) approaches Ϫ1, indicating that decreases in the SOA are fully transferred to RT2. This increase in RT2 with d...

show abstract

“…It has long been noted that the Stroop paradigm produces very robust interference effects (for a review, see MacLeod, 1991), even when the color word is spatially separated from the colored stimulus, reducing incentive to attend it (e.g., Brown et al, 2002;Gatti & Egeth, 1978). Lachter, Ruthruff, Lien, and McCann (2008) recently demonstrated that these Stroop effects (from words presented above or below a color bar) persist even when the steps recommended by Lachter et al (2004) to prevent attentional slippage to color words are taken.…”

Section: Spatial Attention In Word Processingmentioning

confidence: 99%

Even frequent and expected words are not identified without spatial attention

Lien

Ruthruff

Kouchi

et al. 2010

Attention, Perception, & Psychophysics

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

Can visual objects be identified without spatial attention? For example, could a driver attending to another car interpret a passing road sign? This question has generated a large literature, in large part because it is central to how we characterize human visual attention (e.g., whether visual information processing is serial or parallel). The present study examined how spatial attention affects the semantic activation of words. In particular, we examined whether increasing the expectation for specific words within a given context, by repeating a small set of target words, would enable word processing in the absence of spatial attention. The computations involved in word recognition could potentially become much simpler when the set of possible words is greatly reduced, so it is plausible that word recognition would become more automatic and not require spatial attention. Spatial Attention in Word ProcessingThe role of spatial attention in word processing has long been a contentious issue (see Neely & Kahan, 2001, for a review). Most studies have used some variant of a priming paradigm. In a typical paradigm, a word (which we will refer to as the prime) that requires no response is presented simultaneously with, or immediately preceding, a target word to which a speeded response is made. In such studies it is well documented that, when the prime is attended, participants respond faster to related targets than to unrelated targets. In the lexical decision task (word vs. nonword), for instance, participants are faster to indicate that the target is a word (e.g., butter) when an attended prime is a related word (e.g., bread ) rather than an unrelated word (e.g., nurse; e.g., Meyer & Schvaneveldt, 1971; see Neely, 1991, for a review of associative priming effects). Similarly, people are slower to name the color of a bar if the name of a different color is printed nearby (the Stroop effect; e.g., Stroop, 1935; see MacLeod, 1991, for a review).In most of the studies described above, the prime was presented in an attended location, even though the prime itself did not require a response. Priming effects have proven to be less consistent when attention is not directed to the prime. Some studies have suggested that spatial attention plays little or no role in semantic activation during word processing (e.g., Brown, Gore, & Carr, 973© 2010 The Psychonomic Society, Inc. Previous studies have disagreed about the extent to which people extract meaning from words presented outside the focus of spatial attention. The present study examined a possible explanation for such discrepancies inspired by attenuation theory: Unattended words can be read more automatically when they are expected within a given context (e.g., due to frequent repetition). We presented a brief prime word in lowercase, followed by a target word in uppercase. Participants indicated whether the target word belonged to a particular category (e.g., "sports"). When we used a visual cue to draw attention to the location of the prime word, it produced substantia...

show abstract

Visual attention and word recognition in Stroop color naming: Is word recognition "automatic?"

Cited by 130 publications

References 76 publications

Anger as “seeing red”: Evidence for a perceptual association

Anger as “seeing red”: Evidence for a perceptual association

Testing the Predictions of the Central Capacity Sharing Model.

Even frequent and expected words are not identified without spatial attention

Contact Info

Product

Resources

About