Discussions of the source of the Stroop interference effect continue to pervade the literature. Semantic competition posits that interference results from competing semantic activation of word and color dimensions of the stimulus prior to response selection. Response competition posits that interference results from competing responses for articulating the word dimension vs. the color dimension...

In picture-word interference experiments, participants name pictures (e.g., of a cat) while trying to ignore distractor words. Mean response time (RT) is typically longer with semantically related distractor words (e.g., dog) than with unrelated words (e.g., shoe), called semantic interference. Previous research has examined the RT distributional characteristics of distractor effects by perform...

Decades of research using the Deese-Roediger-McDermott (DRM) paradigm have demonstrated that episodic memory is vulnerable to semantic distortion, and neuroimaging investigations of this phenomenon have shown dissociations between the neural mechanisms subserving true and false retrieval from long-term memory. Recently, false short-term memories have also been demonstrated, with false recogniti...

In picture-word interference experiments, participants name pictures (e.g., of a cat) while trying to ignore distractor words. Mean response time (RT) is typically longer with semantically related distractor words (e.g., dog) than with unrelated words (e.g., shoe), called semantic interference. Previous research has examined the RT distributional characteristics of distractor effects by perform...

Work in functional neuroimaging has mapped interference resolution processing onto left inferior frontal regions for both verbal working memory and a variety of semantic processing tasks. The proximity of the identified regions from these different tasks suggests the existence of a common, domain-general interference resolution mechanism. The current research specifically tests this idea in a w...

Two experiments examined the effect of semantic interference on visual lexical decision (vLD) in normal skilled readers. Experiment 1 employed a dual-task paradigm to test whether nonverbal semantic processing disrupts visual word recognition when the orthographic structure of words and non-words is controlled. Experiment 2 employed the same paradigm to test whether participants strategically s...

While both semantic and highly emotional (i.e., taboo) words can interfere with speech production, different theoretical mechanisms have been proposed to explain why interference occurs. Two experiments investigated these theoretical approaches by comparing the magnitude of these two types of interference and the stages at which they occur during picture naming. Participants named target pictur...