Selective attention and response set in the Stroop task

Response set membership contributes much to the interference in the color-word Stroop task. This may be due to selective allocation of attention to eligible responses or, alternatively, to greater inhibition of distractors that are not responses. In the present article, we report two experiments tha...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:Memory & cognition 2010-10, Vol.38 (7), p.893-904
Main Authors: Lamers, Martijn J. M., Roelofs, Ardi, Rabeling-Keus, Inge M.
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Activity levels. Psychomotricity
Adolescent
Adult
Attention
Behavioral Science and Psychology
Biological and medical sciences
Cognition
Cognition & reasoning
Cognitive Psychology
Experiments
Female
Fundamental and applied biological sciences. Psychology
Humans
Male
Psychology
Psychology. Psychoanalysis. Psychiatry
Psychology. Psychophysiology
Set (Psychology)
Stroop Test
Studies
Vigilance. Attention. Sleep
Young Adult
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Summary:Response set membership contributes much to the interference in the color-word Stroop task. This may be due to selective allocation of attention to eligible responses or, alternatively, to greater inhibition of distractors that are not responses. In the present article, we report two experiments that were designed to adjudicate between these accounts. In Experiment 1, membership was manipulated on a trial-by-trial basis by cuing the possible responses for each trial. Response time (RT) was longer for distractors that corresponded to a cued, eligible response than to an ineligible one. This cuing effect was independent of the number of different responses. In Experiment 2, the distractor was cued on half the trials. Cuing the distractor decreased RTs on both incongruent and congruent trials. Vincentile analyses in both experiments revealed that the effects were constant throughout the entire RT distributions. These results suggest that response set effects arise because of selective allocation of attention to eligible responses.
ISSN:0090-502X
1532-5946
DOI:10.3758/MC.38.7.893