Psychological distance and reaction time in a Stroop task

Several sources of interference may simultaneously affect the onset of the well-known “Stroop effect.” Among them is the semantic component, which is reflected in the gradient or semantic effect . This effect consists of an increase in the amount of interference as the semantic distance between the...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:Cognitive processing 2013-11, Vol.14 (4), p.401-410
Main Authors: De Marchis, Giorgio, Rivero Expósito, María del Prado, Reales Avilés, José Manuel
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Activity levels. Psychomotricity
Adult
Analysis of Variance
Artificial Intelligence
Behavioral Sciences
Biological and medical sciences
Biomedical and Life Sciences
Biomedicine
Cognition - physiology
Color
Data Interpretation, Statistical
Female
Fundamental and applied biological sciences. Psychology
Generalization, Stimulus
Humans
Male
Middle Aged
Neurosciences
Photic Stimulation
Psychology. Psychoanalysis. Psychiatry
Psychology. Psychophysiology
Reaction time
Reaction Time - physiology
Research Report
Semantics
Stroop Test
Word Association Tests
Young Adult
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Summary:Several sources of interference may simultaneously affect the onset of the well-known “Stroop effect.” Among them is the semantic component, which is reflected in the gradient or semantic effect . This effect consists of an increase in the amount of interference as the semantic distance between the word and the color concept decreases. Shepard (Science 237:1317–1323, 1987 ) relates psychological space, measured through multidimensional scaling, to mean response times. The present investigation aims to study the function relating the semantic gradient with the psychological distance between the word and the color in a Stroop task. After measuring the gradient, we obtained the subjective rating of the degree of dissimilarity of the gradient words with the concept of “color.” In our work, we show that the amount of interference in a Stroop task increases when the semantic distance from the word to the color concept decreases, and it does so exponentially. We replicated the study with different stimuli to test the robustness of the results.
ISSN:1612-4782
1612-4790
DOI:10.1007/s10339-013-0569-x