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01-03-2013 | Original Article

Measuring the allocation of attention in the Stroop task: evidence from eye movement patterns

Auteur: Bettina Olk

Gepubliceerd in: Psychological Research | Uitgave 2/2013

Abstract

Attention plays a crucial role in the Stroop task, which requires attending to less automatically processed task-relevant attributes of stimuli and the suppression of involuntary processing of task-irrelevant attributes. The experiment assessed the allocation of attention by monitoring eye movements throughout congruent and incongruent trials. Participants viewed two stimulus arrays that differed regarding the amount of items and their numerical value and judged by manual response which of the arrays contained more items, while disregarding their value. Different viewing patterns were observed between congruent (e.g., larger array of numbers with higher value) and incongruent (e.g., larger array of numbers with lower value) trials. The direction of first saccades was guided by task-relevant information but in the incongruent condition directed more frequently towards task-irrelevant information. The data further suggest that the difference in the deployment of attention between conditions changes throughout a trial, likely reflecting the impact and resolution of the conflict. For instance, stimulus arrays in line with the correct response were attended for longer and fixations were longer for incongruent trials, with the second fixation and considering all fixations. By the time of the correct response, this latter difference between conditions was absent. Possible mechanisms underlying eye movement patterns are discussed.

vorige artikel How reliable is the attentional blink? Examining the relationships within and between attentional blink tasks over time

volgende artikel Processing numerosity, length and duration in a three-dimensional Stroop-like task: towards a gradient of processing automaticity?

The parallel distributed processing account has originally been applied to the word–colour task.

As the number of saccades and fixations differed between trials not every saccade/fixation made in a trial was analysed separately.

No filler items were used (see Pansky & Algom, 2002) to allow easy identification of the amount of items without the need for detailed visual search of a stimulus array as this would implicitly encourage strategic eye movements, which would not be triggered by the amount or the value of the numbers but simply the need to search.

It is unlikely that the direction of saccades and fixation durations were simply directed to the array containing more items because those were physically slightly larger. In an experiment with similar stimuli but different instructions participants did not look more often to the physically larger arrays (Olk, 2007).

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Titel: Measuring the allocation of attention in the Stroop task: evidence from eye movement patterns
Auteur: Bettina Olk
Publicatiedatum: 01-03-2013
Uitgeverij: Springer-Verlag
Gepubliceerd in: Psychological Research / Uitgave 2/2013
Print ISSN: 0340-0727
Elektronisch ISSN: 1430-2772
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s00426-011-0405-9

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