Abstract
We investigated the impact of making the color carrier word visually unfamiliar via case and font mIxInG in the context of three Stroop experiments. Experiment 1 yielded anincrease in the size of the Stroop effect when the color carrier words were visually unfamiliar relative to lowercase words that were case and font consistent. Experiments 2A and 2B showed that the modulation of the Stroop effect by visual familiarity observed in Experiment 1 was eliminated when there was no correlation between the color and the color carrier word. These results are considered in the light of four different theoretical accounts of the Stroop effect (strength of association [Cohen, Dunbar, & McClelland, 1990], instance [Logan, 1988], schema [MacLeod, 2000], and obligatory processing followed by deactivation [Coltheart, Woollams, Kinoshita, & Perry, 1999]). None of these accounts appear capable of explaining all the results.
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Supported by Grant A0998 from the NSERC of Canada to D.B. Experiment 1 was presented at the 12th Annual Meeting of the Canadian Society for Brain, Behaviour, and Cognitive Science (CSBBCS), Vancouver, Canada. Experiments 2A and 2B were presented at the 14th Annual CSBBCS meeting, St. John’s, Canada. We thank Tram Neill, Jennifer Burt, Veronica Dark, and several anonymous reviewers for comments on earlier versions of the manuscript.
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Blais, C., Besner, D. When the visual format of the color carrier word does and does not modulate the Stroop effect. Memory & Cognition 33, 1337–1344 (2005). https://doi.org/10.3758/BF03193366
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.3758/BF03193366