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 ...

This study examined Stroop-like interference in the fruit Stroop test among 271 5 12-year-old children and young adults divided into five age groups: 64 5 6-year-olds, 65 7 8-year-olds, 60 9 10-year-olds, 46 11 12-year-olds, and 36 young adults (18 23-year-olds). Participants were administered a paper-and-pencil version of the fruit Stroop test, which includes the canonical color task, the supe...

The framework of dimensional interaction was used to test the hypothesis that the Stroop effect is partially rooted in mismatches in baseline discriminability, with stimulus differences along the word dimension typically exceeding stimulus differences along the color dimension. Subjects made speeded classifications, with either keypresses or vocalizations, of either words or colors. Stroop cong...

This article presents a cognitive model that reconciles a surprising observation in the picture-word interference (PWI) paradigm with the general notion that PWI is a form of Stroop interference. Dell'Acqua, Job, Peressotti, and Pascali (2007) assessed PWI using a psychological refractory period (PRP) paradigm, and concluded that the locus of interference in PWI is during the perceptual encodin...

Three experiments investigated the effects of advance information about orientation on the processing of relevant and irrelevant objects, as indicated by Stroop effects from color words located in either object. Four results were obtained. First, participants showed the expected modulation of the Stroop effect: words in the relevant object produced much larger Stroop effects than words in the i...

The current research investigated differences in reactive and proactive cognitive control as a function of depressive symptomatology. Three participant groups with varying symptom levels (Beck Depression Inventory-II, BDI-II score) completed both the classic and an emotional-face Stroop task separately under speed and accuracy instructions. All groups made equivalent speed-accuracy trade-offs i...

Bilinguals have been shown to outperform monolinguals at suppressing task-irrelevant information and on overall speed during cognitive control tasks. Here, monolinguals' and bilinguals' performance was compared on two nonlinguistic tasks: a Stroop task (with perceptual Stimulus-Stimulus conflict among stimulus features) and a Simon task (with Stimulus-Response conflict). Across two experiments ...

Although previous studies have suggested that conflict control can occur in the absence of consciousness, the brain mechanisms underlying unconscious and conscious conflict control remain unclear. The current study used a rapid event-related functional magnetic resonance imaging design to collect data from 24 participants while they performed a masked Stroop priming task under both conscious an...

The present work investigated possible temporal constraints on the posthypnotic word blindness suggestion effect. In a completely within-subjects and counterbalanced design 19 highly suggestible individuals performed the Stroop task both with and without a posthypnotic suggestion that they would be unable to read the word dimension of the Stroop stimulus, both when response-stimulus interval (R...

Previous studies show Stroop effect is stronger in the right visual field. However, (1) whether the lateralization patterns of two aspects of Stroop effects, facilitation and inhibition, for native Chinese speakers are similar to each other, and (2) whether secondary interference tasks modulate Stroop effect as in the studies about the lateralized Whorf effect, are remaining open questions. We ...