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15-09-2022 | Original Article

What is word? The boundary conditions of task conflict in the Stroop task

Auteurs: Eldad Keha, Eyal Kalanthroff

Gepubliceerd in: Psychological Research | Uitgave 4/2023

Abstract

The Stroop task is characterized by two types of conflicts—information conflict (between the incongruent word and ink color) and task conflict (between the relevant color-naming task and the competing, irrelevant, stimulus-driven, word reading task). It is not yet clear what stimuli trigger the task of reading, and thus task conflict, and to what extent. In the current study, we applied a novel low-control (high neutral proportion) between-subject design to test the effect of different neutral conditions (symbols, same-letter strings, illegal-letter strings, pseudo-words, and real-words) on task conflict, in both manual and vocal response-types. Results indicated that in the manual task, a reverse facilitation effect, a signature of task conflict, appeared in all non-word conditions in a similar magnitude, but did not appear in the real-words condition. In the vocal task, reverse facilitation was found only in the symbols condition, regular facilitation was exhibited in all other neutral conditions, and larger facilitation appeared in the real-words condition. Our results indicate that the reading process and the activation of task conflict, depend on response-types (manual vs. vocal). In both response-types we found support for a word superiority effect, such that words trigger task conflict to a greater extent, however, we only observed an orthographic effect in the vocal response-type where stimuli consisting of letters triggered the reading task. We concluded that in the manual response-type, conflict arises only in the lexical route, whilst in the vocal response-type, conflict arises in the lexical and orthographic routes.

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Mean RTs were 583 for geometric shapes, 634 for same-letter strings, and 646 for real-words.

Mean RTs were 514 for symbols, 540 for non-pronounceable heterogeneous strings, 543 for pseudo-words, and 547 for real-words.

Mean RTs were: 580 for symbols, 581 for same-letter strings, 607 for non-pronounceable heterogeneous strings, 641 for pseudo-words, and 651 for real-words.

The Hebrew language contains ‘final form’ letters, which are letters that are written in a different way if they appear at the end of the word (similar to Arabic and Greek). Thus, the Hebrew language presents a unique opportunity to create clear illegal-letter strings that are structurally impossible and unreadable.

We have used the exact same cueing procedure from Goldfarb and Henik (2007) and Kalanthroff et al., (2013) of cueing congruent and incongruent trials in half of the trials. However, this procedure did not affect the results and therefore we did not include it as a variable in the analysis. Note, that this finding is consistent with Jiménez et al. (2021).

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Titel: What is word? The boundary conditions of task conflict in the Stroop task
Auteurs: Eldad Keha
Eyal Kalanthroff
Publicatiedatum: 15-09-2022
Uitgeverij: Springer Berlin Heidelberg
Gepubliceerd in: Psychological Research / Uitgave 4/2023
Print ISSN: 0340-0727
Elektronisch ISSN: 1430-2772
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s00426-022-01738-z

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