In grapheme-color synesthesia, a number or letter can evoke two different and possibly conflicting (real and synesthetic) color sensations at the same time. In this study, we investigate the relationship between synesthesia and executive control functions. First, no general skill differences were obtained between synesthetes and non-synesthetes in classic executive control paradigms. Furthermor...

A fundamental issue in psycholinguistics concerns how speakers retrieve intended words from long-term memory. According to a selection by competition account (e.g., Levelt et al., 1999), conceptually driven word retrieval involves the activation of a set of candidate words and a competitive selection of the intended word from this set. Selection by competition explains, for example, the Stroop ...

This article presents a new account of the color-word Stroop phenomenon (J. R. Stroop, 1935) based on an implemented model of word production, WEAVER++ (W. J. M. Levelt, A. Roelofs, & A. S. Meyer, 1999b; A. Roelofs, 1992, 1997c). Stroop effects are claimed to arise from processing interactions within the language-production architecture and explicit goal-referenced control. WEAVER++ successfull...

Latent inhibition (LI), poor evidence of learning following preexposure to a task-irrelevant stimulus, reflects the ability to ignore inconsequential events. Stroop interference represents a failure to inhibit processing of a task-irrelevant word when it is incongruent with the required naming of the word's print color. The apparent commonality between the two effects is in contradiction to the...

This paper addresses the issue of the locus of action in cognitive processing during Stroop effects. It uses the P300 latency to assess stimulus processing effects, but, for the first time, under conditions in which Stroop stimuli are rare and target stimuli. The study was also concerned with demonstrating that apparent P300s during verbal responding are in fact uninterpretable due to contamina...

BACKGROUND This study tested the hypothesis that microstructural white matter abnormalities in frontostriatal-limbic tracts are associated with poor response inhibition on the Stroop task in depressed elders. METHOD Fifty-one elders with major depression participated in a 12-week escitalopram trial. Diffusion tensor imaging was used to determine fractional anisotropy (FA) in white matter regi...

Conflict detection and resolution is crucial in a cognitive task like the Stroop task. Previous studies have identified an early negativity component (N(inc)) as a prominent marker of Stroop conflict in event-related potentials (ERPs). However, to what extent this ERP component reflects conflict detection and/or resolution is still unclear. Here, we report a Stroop task in which the stimulus on...

It is widely believed that threatening stimuli in our environment capture attention. Much of the core evidence for attentional capture by threatening stimuli comes from the Emotional Stroop task. Yet recent evidence suggests that the Emotional Stroop task does not measure attentional capture (e.g., Algom et al., 2004). The present paper assesses whether threat words can capture attention using ...