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25-11-2014 | Original Article

Exploring relations between task conflict and informational conflict in the Stroop task

Auteurs: Olga Entel, Joseph Tzelgov, Yoella Bereby-Meyer, Nitzan Shahar

Gepubliceerd in: Psychological Research | Uitgave 6/2015

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Abstract

In this study, we tested the proposal that the Stroop task involves two conflicts—task conflict and informational conflict. Task conflict was defined as the latency difference between color words and non-letter neutrals, and manipulated by varying the proportion of color words versus non-letter neutrals. Informational conflict was defined as the latency difference between incongruent and congruent trials and manipulated by varying the congruent-to-incongruent trial ratio. We replicated previous findings showing that increasing the ratio of incongruent-to-congruent trials reduces the latency difference between the incongruent and congruent condition (i.e., informational conflict), as does increasing the proportion of color words (i.e., task conflict). A significant under-additive interaction between the two proportion manipulations (congruent vs. incongruent and color words vs. neutrals) indicated that the effects of task conflict and informational conflict were not additive. By assessing task conflict as the contrast between color words and neutrals, we found that task conflict existed in all of our experimental conditions. Under specific conditions, when task conflict dominated behavior by explaining most of the variability between congruency conditions, we also found negative facilitation, thus demonstrating that this effect is a special case of task conflict.
Voetnoten
1
Task conflict = SSC (color words vs. neutrals)/SSB (the variability due to the different congruency conditions). Informational conflict = SSC (congruent vs. incongruent)/SSB (the variability due to the different congruency conditions). Note that these measures are in fact r alerting 2 as defined by Rosenthal, Rosnow and Rubin (2000).
 
2
All contrasts were also tested at a significance level of 0.05 by Scheffe's test, F = 9.48.
 
3
Due to the need for an acceptable number of trials to reliably extract ex-Gaussian parameters (Lacouture & Cousineau, 2008), we could not fit the model for both congruent and incongruent trials in each C/I condition. Thus, ex-Gaussian fitting was performed only for congruent trials in the C/I = 80/20 condition (24 incongruent trials and 96 congruent trials) and incongruent trials from the C/I = 20/80 condition (24 congruent trials and 96 congruent stimuli).
 
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Metagegevens
Titel
Exploring relations between task conflict and informational conflict in the Stroop task
Auteurs
Olga Entel
Joseph Tzelgov
Yoella Bereby-Meyer
Nitzan Shahar
Publicatiedatum
25-11-2014
Uitgeverij
Springer Berlin Heidelberg
Gepubliceerd in
Psychological Research / Uitgave 6/2015
Print ISSN: 0340-0727
Elektronisch ISSN: 1430-2772
DOI
https://doi.org/10.1007/s00426-014-0630-0