Two experiments examined the relations among working memory capacity (WMC), congruency-sequence effects, proportion-congruency effects, and the color-word Stroop effect to test whether congruency-sequence effects might inform theoretical claims regarding WMC's prediction of Stroop interference. In Experiment 1, subjects completed either a high-congruency or low-congruency Stroop task that restr...

Latent inhibition (LI), poor evidence of learning following preexposure to a task-irrelevant stimulus, reflects the ability to ignore inconsequential events. Stroop interference represents a failure to inhibit processing of a task-irrelevant word when it is incongruent with the required naming of the word's print color. The apparent commonality between the two effects is in contradiction to the...

Two groups of college students were selected on the basis of their scores on the Dissociative Experiences Scale (DES). The highDES group (score > 20, M = 29.6; n = 54) and low-DES group (score < 10, M = 5.1; n = 54) both completed the standard and a new dualtask version of the Stroop ink-naming task with xs (baseline condition) and color, neutral, and emotionally charged words. Free recall resu...

Studies using the single trial Stroop task consistently reveal increased reaction time (RT) facilitation effects among schizophrenia patients. One possible mechanism underlying this effect is increased automatic spreading activation in semantic networks. The current study was designed to test this hypothesis. We administered the Stroop task and two semantic priming tasks to the same subjects. P...

Two conflicting findings characterize cognitive processing accompanying bilingualism. The “bilingual advantage” refers to improved cognitive performance for bilingual compared to monolingual participants. Most bilingual advantages fall under the umbrella of cognitive control mechanisms, most frequently demonstrated using the Stroop task and the Simon task (e.g., Bialystok, 2008; Coderre, Van He...

Research on psychopathy in women has generated equivocal laboratory findings. This study examined the performance of psychopathic women in 2 laboratory tasks designed to assess abnormal selective attention associated with response modulation deficits: a computerized picture-word (PW) task, and a picture-word Stroop (PW Stroop) task. Consistent with data from psychopathic men, women receiving hi...

Previous studies suggested that age-related deficits of walking are accentuated under dualtask conditions when the non-walking task is visually demanding. Here we evaluate whether a requirement for manual skills is critical as well. Young (22±2 years) and older (69±3 years) subjects walked along a straight path while performing a task that required manual skills but no visual processing, i.e., ...

Drug-related cues have been shown to take effects on behavioral performance and physiological parameters such as event-related brain potentials (ERPs). In the present study we obtained EEG data during a modified Stroop task and during a color matching task using smoking related and neutral words (nicotine Stroop) in smokers and non-smoking controls. We assumed that in smokers smoking-related wo...