A Unique Asymmetrical Stroop Effect in Absolute Pitch Possessors

Author(s):  
Lilach Akiva-Kabiri ◽  
Avishai Henik

The Stroop task has been employed to study automaticity or failures of selective attention for many years. The effect is known to be asymmetrical, with words affecting color naming but not vice versa. In the current work two auditory-visual Stroop-like tasks were devised in order to study the automaticity of pitch processing in both absolute pitch (AP) possessors and musically trained controls without AP (nAP). In the tone naming task, participants were asked to name the auditory tone while ignoring a visual note name. In the note naming task, participants were asked to read a note name while ignoring the auditory tone. The nAP group showed a significant congruency effect only in the tone naming task, whereas AP possessors showed the reverse pattern, with a significant congruency effect only in the note reading task. Thus, AP possessors were unable to ignore the auditory tone when asked to read the note, but were unaffected by the verbal note name when asked to label the auditory tone. The results suggest that pitch identification in participants endowed with AP ability is automatic and impossible to suppress.

2003 ◽  
Vol 8 (4) ◽  
pp. 252-265 ◽  
Author(s):  
Manuel G. Calvo ◽  
P. Avero ◽  
M. Dolores Castillo ◽  
Juan J. Miguel-Tobal

We examined the relative contribution of specific components of multidimensional anxiety to cognitive biases in the processing of threat-related information in three experiments. Attentional bias was assessed by the emotional Stroop word color-naming task, interpretative bias by an on-line inference processing task, and explicit memory bias by sensitivity (d') and response criterion (β) from word-recognition scores. Multiple regression analyses revealed, first, that phobic anxiety and evaluative anxiety predicted selective attention to physical- and ego-threat information, respectively; cognitive anxiety predicted selective attention to both types of threat. Second, phobic anxiety predicted inhibition of inferences related to physically threatening outcomes of ambiguous situations. And, third, evaluative anxiety predicted a response bias, rather than a genuine memory bias, in the reporting of presented and nonpresented ego-threat information. Other anxiety components, such as motor and physiological anxiety, or interpersonal and daily-routines anxiety made no specific contribution to any cognitive bias. Multidimensional anxiety measures are useful for detecting content-specificity effects in cognitive biases.


2009 ◽  
Vol 20 (8) ◽  
pp. 1019-1025 ◽  
Author(s):  
Gary D. Sherman ◽  
Gerald L. Clore

Three studies examined automatic associations between words with moral and immoral meanings and the colors black and white. The speed of color naming in a Stroop task was faster when words in black concerned immorality (e.g., greed), rather than morality, and when words in white concerned morality (e.g., honesty), rather than immorality. In addition, priming immorality by having participants hand-copy an unethical statement speeded identification of words in the black font. Making immorality salient in this way also increased the moral Stroop effect among participants who had not previously shown it. In the final study, participants also rated consumer products. Moral meanings interfered with color naming most strongly among those participants who rated personal cleaning products as especially desirable. The moderation of the moral Stroop effect by individual differences in concerns about personal cleanliness suggests that ideas about purity and pollution are central to seeing morality in black and white.


Author(s):  
Ami Eidels ◽  
Kathryn Ryan ◽  
Paul Williams ◽  
Daniel Algom

The presence of the Stroop effect betrays the fact that the carrier words were read in the face of instructions to ignore them and to respond to the target ink colors. In this study, we probed the nature of this involuntary reading by comparing color performance with that in a new forced-reading Stroop task in which responding is strictly contingent on reading each and every word. We found larger Stroop effects in the forced-reading task than in the classic Stroop task and concluded that words are processed to a shallower level in the Stroop task than they are in routine voluntary reading. The results show that the two modes of word processing differ in systematic ways and are conductive to qualitatively different representations. These results can pose a challenge to the strongly automatic view of word reading in the Stroop task.


1981 ◽  
Vol 53 (3) ◽  
pp. 835-841 ◽  
Author(s):  
Michael J. Zajano ◽  
Elaine M. Hoyceanyls ◽  
Jeanne F. Ouellette

Two experiments were performed to investigate the magnitude of the confound in the standard control condition of the Stroop experiment. The confound resides in the fact that only color changes from one item to the next in the control condition, whereas both color and configuration of the items that represent color change in the usual experimental conditions. The results of both experiments showed small but significant increases in color-naming time when both colors and non-verbal shapes changed from one item to the next. These findings are discussed in the context of the role of factors in selective attention in the color-naming task. While response competition appears to be the more substantial source of interference in Stroop color-word effects, a smaller but more general source of interference due to selective attention appears in whole-list tasks with more than one dimension of item-to-item change.


1996 ◽  
Vol 83 (3) ◽  
pp. 1059-1070 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jenn-Yeu Chen

The Stroop facilitation and interference effects as observed in the Stroop color-naming task are typically measured as the difference in naming time between the congruent or the conflicting condition and the neutral condition. The measure assumes the regression function relating the congruent or conflicting naming time to neutral naming time is linear with a slope of one and a nonzero intercept. Instead, analysis showed that the regression function subserving the facilitation effect, in fact, had a slope of less than one with a zero intercept. Analysis also showed that the regression function subserving the interference effect had a zero intercept with a greater than one slope. These results suggest that the Stroop facilitation and interference effects are the consequence of a multiplicative process by which each stage of the naming process is reduced or increased by a constant proportion. Also the appropriate measure of the Stroop effect is the ratio of the congruent (for facilitation) or the conflicting (for interference) naming time over the neutral naming time.


1999 ◽  
Vol 58 (4) ◽  
pp. 241-250 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kerry Kawakami ◽  
Kenneth L. Dion ◽  
John F. Dovidio

In the present study, automatic stereotype activation related to racial categories was examined utilizing a primed Stroop task. The speed of participants' ink-color naming of stereotypic and nonstereotypic target words following Black and White category primes were compared: slower naming times are presumed to reflect interference from automatic activation. The results provide support for automatic activation of implicit prejudice and stereotypes. With respect to prejudice, naming latencies tended to be slower for positive words following White than Black primes and slower for negative words following Black than White primes. With regard to stereotypes, participants demonstrated slower naming latencies for Black stereotypes, primarily those that were negatively valenced, following Black than White category primes. These findings provide further evidence of the automatic activation of stereotypes and prejudice that occurs without intention.


Author(s):  
Laurent Grégoire ◽  
Pierre Perruchet ◽  
Bénédicte Poulin-Charronnat

Grégoire, Perruchet, and Poulin-Charronnat (2013) claimed that the Musical Stroop task, which reveals the automaticity of note naming in musician experts, provides a new tool for studying the development of automatisms through extensive training in natural settings. Many of the criticisms presented in the four commentaries published in this issue appear to be based on a misunderstanding of our procedure, or questionable postulates. We maintain that the Musical Stroop Effect offers promising possibilities for further research on automaticity, with the main proviso that the current procedure makes it difficult to tease apart facilitation and interference.


2001 ◽  
Author(s):  
Celine Lermercier ◽  
Thierry Bouillot ◽  
Sandrine Cogniard

2016 ◽  
Vol 28 (5) ◽  
pp. 763-772 ◽  
Author(s):  
Chris Blais ◽  
Emily Hubbard ◽  
George R. Mangun

Proportion congruency effects are the observation that the magnitude of the Stroop effect increases as the proportion of congruent trials in a block increases. Contemporary work shows that proportion effects can be specific to a particular context. For example, in a Simon task in which items appearing above fixation are mostly congruent and items appearing below fixation are mostly incongruent, the Simon effect is larger for the items appearing at the top. There is disagreement as to whether these context-specific effects result from simple associative learning or, instead, a type of conflict-mediated associative learning. Here, we address this question in an ERP study using a Simon task in which the proportion congruency effect was context-specific, manipulating the proportion of congruent trials based on location (upper vs. lower visual field). We found significant behavioral proportion congruency effects that varied with the specific contexts. In addition, we observed that the N2 response of the ERPs to the stimuli was larger in amplitude for the high congruent (high conflict) versus low congruent (low conflict) conditions/contexts. Because the N2 is known to be greater in amplitude also for trials where conflict is high and is believed to be an electrical signal related to conflict detection in the medial frontal cortex, this supports the idea that conflict-mediated associative learning is involved in the proportion congruency effect.


2015 ◽  
Vol 31 (2) ◽  
pp. 504
Author(s):  
Alvaro Sanchez-Lopez ◽  
Rafael Quinto-Guillen ◽  
Josefa Pérez-Lucas ◽  
Rosa Jurado-Barba ◽  
Isabel Martínez-Grass ◽  
...  

Attention bias for alcohol has proved useful to distinguish people with a pathological consumption of people who do not, and dependents who are more likely to fall in consumption. The aim of this study was to validate the Spanish version of the Alcohol Stroop test, designed to evaluate attention biases for alcohol in alcohol-dependent patients. The sample was composed by 173 participants divided into 2 groups: 1) “Patients” (<em>n = </em>88) meeting criteria for alcohol dependence; and 2) “Control” (<em>n = </em>85) having a low risk for alcohol consumption, that completed the Stroop color naming Task (Classic Stroop), the Neutral Stroop test and the alcohol Stroop test. Statistically significant differences were found in the interference effects calculated for the Classic and Alcohol Stroop tests. Patients compared to control participants showed a higher interference effect for alcohol-related stimuli than for neutral stimuli. These effects were accounted by an attention bias for alcohol-related information in patients. ROC curves were calculated for the three interference effects, showing an area under the curve statistically significant in the Classic Stroop interference and the Alcohol Stroop interference. This study provides the validation of the Spanish version of the Alcohol Stroop test that allows to evaluate attention biases for alcohol stimuli in individuals with both pathologic alcohol consumption and alcohol dependence.


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