The Down Information Processing Occurs

The Stroop effect is demonstrated by the reaction time to determine a color when the color is printed in a different color’s name. Participants respond slower or make more errors when the meaning of the word is incongruent with the color of the word. Despite knowing the meaning of the word, participants showed incapability of ignoring the stimulus attribute. This reflects a clear instance of semantic interference and an unfathomed failure of selective attention (Stroop, 1935).

The Stroop (1935) effect is the inability to ignore a color word when the task is to report the ink color of that word (i.e., to say "green" to the word RED in green ink). The present study investigated whether object-based processing contributes to the Stroop effect. According to this view, observers are unable to ignore irrelevant features of an attended object (Kahneman & Henik, 1981). In three experiments, participants had to name the color of one of two superimposed rectangles and to ignore words that appeared in the relevant object, in the irrelevant object, or in the background. The words were congruent,

The results of Roediger and McDermott’s experiment were very significant. The participants recalled the critical distractor words 40% of the time compared to 14% recall of the normal distractor words. When they

In the first phase of this study that was based around recognising global features, the letters used were large H’s or S’s. In the second phase, global letters of H, S and O were used and were made up of smaller H’s or S’s, the local characters. These make up the 3 stimulus types: congruent, neutral and conflicting. The large and small letters could be combined to create 3 types of displays: 1) Consistent, where the large and small letters were the same (H printed from small H’s, or S made of small S’s). 2) Conflicting (H made of small S’s, S made of small H’s), and 3) Neutral (H made of O’s, S made of

Some research, though, seems to suggest that the processes behind word identification are not entirely automatic, they are to some extent avoidable. A study carried out by Kahneman and Henik (1979) supported this as they found that interference was greatly decreased when the colour name is in an adjacent location, rather than in the same location as the colour which participants are asked to name. Again though, this reduction in interference is due to the placement of the distracting word, not due to any effort by or ability of the participants.

This was achieved by presenting central cues, indicating the position of the target letter thus increasing focus. Through these experiments they found that when a subject is in a diffuse attention state (unfocussed) SOD do cause attentional capture and increase reaction time. However, if the subject was presented with a cue this same increase in reaction time was not observed. This led them to conclude that attentional capture from SOD is not automatic and instead propose a priority based visual attention system. In 2006 Neo and Chua conducted research which built upon Yantis and Jonides’ to further demonstrate effects of attentional capture on reaction time. They investigated whether sporadic use of the SOD increased the effect of attentional capture as well as investigated whether maintaining the same position for the target letter decreased reaction times. They found that SOD attentional capture did affect reaction times and unlike in Yantis and Jonides’ experiment they concluded SOD did trigger an automaticity response when used

Powell (1986) conducted a study in which individuals viewed a photo or slide. Individuals were required to scan images and decide on an image for the entire display (Powell, 1986). Objects were pointed to, and subjects were asked to identify its location (Powell, 1986). The subject was asked to close his or her eyes and were shown another image. The subjects were to decide if the object was in the correct position (Powell, 1986). The subjects would hear one of the objects and was required to focus on the object while keeping the entire image in his or her mind (Powell, 1986). When the next object was identified, the subjects were to move from the first object to the second watching a black dot moving in a straight line (Powell, 1986).

The two independent variables were luminant cue patches (light cue, dark cue and equiluminant cue) and location of the cue and target (valid side with cue and target on same side and invalid side with cue and target on opposite sides). The dependent variable was participants’ reaction time in millisecond.

Using paired wordlists of nouns, Bower and Gordon demonstrated this in their 1970 experiment. In their study, they had undergraduate students learn paired wordlists by one of four methods – rehearsal of the two words; reading a sentence in which one of the words acted upon the other (i.e. “The boy hit the ball.”); creating a sentence which linked the two words (i.e. “Nancy threw her bag on the table.”) or creating a mental image of the two words together (i.e. imagining a basket of flowers) (Bower & Gordon, 1970). Results found that students who employed imagery did better on recalling the word pairs in comparison to other methods and those who utilized rehearsal had the lowest recall rate out of the four groups (Bower & Gordon, 1970).

Early studies have widely researched attention with selective processing (Driver, 2001). Broadbent (1958) filter theory of attention states that certain information does not require focal attention. It is based on certain stimulus attributes such as colour and shape (Friedenberg, 2012). A previous study carried out by Treisman and Schmidt (1982) proposes that when attention is diverted from a display of several figures, the participants incorrectly combine the features of colour and shape therefore increases the illusory conjunctions portrayed by the participants (Tsal, 1989). Another study by Shaw (1978) found that reaction time of participant to identify targets varied with the probability that a target would appear in a particular display location. These results indicate that different amounts of attention towards the targets are distributed to different positions in the visual field. However, Houck and Hoffman (1986) found that the feature integration of colour and orientation can sometimes be accomplished without attention (James et al.,

This study was a seminal replication on attention blink similar to the one done by Raymond et al, in a rapid serial visual presentation (RSVP) task. This study predicted that there would be a higher accuracy for identifying the first target, T1 and lower accuracy for the second target, T2 depending on the lag, given that T1 was accurately reported. 193 students participated in the experiment. This experiment was a part of the course requirement. There was a stream of 19 letters, each lasting for 100 ms. The target letters, T1 and/or T2, to be identified were either a ‘J’ or a ‘K’ or both from the stream of 19 letters presented. In this study, a total of 60 trials were conducted for each participant. For T1, there were 30 ‘J’ and 30 ‘K’ targets. T2 comprised of 24 J, 24 K and 12 null targets. The participants were asked to decide whether they saw the letters J, K, both or neither following the RSVP stream. They were asked to do so by using a button click mechanism. At the end of all the trials, the participants were presented with a summary of their performance report. It was observed that the percentage of T1 reported does not vary significantly as a function of lag. Also, the percentage of T2 reported varied as a function of lag. At greater lag positions, it was seen that the percentage of T2 reported goes above that of T1.

The article by Avital-Cohen and Tsal (2016) discussed the flanker task experiment, which asserted that distractor interference happens unconsciously as a result of focused attention toward the target. The results from the original flanker task indicated that participants had slower responses for incongruent trials, since the distractors are inconsistent with the target and would require a different response (Avital-Cohen & Tsal, 2016). However, Avital-Cohen and Tsal (2016) questioned the findings from the flanker task experiment. They decided to challenge the idea that only the target stimuli receives top-down processing, and not the distractors (Avital-Cohen & Tsal, 2016). The first experiment aimed to test whether the distractor interference is purely bottom-up processing as claimed in the flanker task. The experiment manipulated participants’ expectations of the target using the context effect - a type of top-down processing - by changing the distractors to be either letters or digits (Psych 240 lecture, 9/21/16). Then, the researchers conducted a second experiment and eliminated the ambiguity of distractors. They wanted to test whether the result from experiment 1 was caused by an overall bias or the ambiguous distractors. In experiment 2, the researchers predicted that they would obtain similar results to the first experiment only if the results were due to an overall bias effect (Avital-Cohen & Tsal, 2016). This study allows us to deepen our understanding of available

Word recognition involves an individual’s ability to identify words independently without requiring related words for contextual help. A widely examined topic in the field of cognitive psychology, it deals with understanding printed letters as a word which has been kept in the lexicon. The word frequency effect is important in the recognition of words. It suggests more common words in printed language are easier, faster and more accurate to distinguish than words that appear less frequently. Outlined in their journal article, Howes and Solomon utilized Thorndike-Lorge’s word count for word frequency and measured the threshold of recognition. They found correlation coefficients of -.68 to -.75 between word frequency and threshold or duration.

We are replicating J.R. Stroop’s original experiment The Stroop Effect (Stroop, 1935). The aim of the study was to understand how automatic processing interferes with attempts to attend to sensory information. The independent variable of our experiment was the three conditions, the congruent words, the incongruent words, and the colored squares, and the dependent variable was the time that it took participants to state the ink color of the list of words in each condition. We used repeated measures for the experiment in order to avoid influence of extraneous variables. The participants were 16-17 years of age from Garland High School. The participants will be timed on how long it takes them to say the color of the squares and the color of the words. The research was conducted in the Math Studies class. The participants were aged 16-17 and were students at Garland High School. The results showed that participants took the most time with the incongruent words.