Extensive studies have been conducted to examine various attentional control effects that stem from stimulus-stimulus (S-S) and stimulus-response (S-R) incompatibility. Among these behavioral paradigms, the best-known are the Stroop effect, the Simon effect, and Posner's cue validity effect. In this study, we designed two behavioral tasks incorporating these effects (Simon-color-Stroop and Simo...

Coloring only a single letter in the Stroop task can result in a reduction or elimination of Stroop interference. The present experiments were designed to test whether this modulation of Stroop interference occurs at all letter positions. Specifically, we investigated whether Stroop interference was reduced when the colored letter occupied the optimal viewing position (OVP). The experiments sho...

A common explanation for the interference effect in the classic visual Stroop test is that reading a word (the more automatic semantic response) must be suppressed in favor of naming the text color (the slower sensory response). Neuroimaging studies also consistently report anterior cingulate/medial frontal, lateral prefrontal, and anterior insular structures as key components of a network for ...

Using a Stroop matching task, we evaluated how alcohol affects the time needed to overcome Stroop conflict and whether practice might reverse the effect of alcohol. Participants (n = 16) performed two sessions in which they had to compare the color of a color-word with the meaning of a color-word in neutral color. The two task stimuli were presented simultaneously or with a Stimulus Onset Async...

People have difficulty performing two tasks at once. For example, maintaining items in working memory (WM) makes people more distractible. However, different types of WM load may have different effects on attentional selection depending on whether WM load overlaps with mechanisms involved in target or distractor processing. Three experiments examined the effect of concurrent WM load on Stroop t...

Age-related differences in the reduction of Stroop interference were explored by comparing the performance of 18 younger (of mean age: 30.0±3.9 years) and 18 older healthy adults (of mean age: 75±7.2 years) in a color-word Stroop task. The aim of this study was to determine whether a decrease in the efficiency of inhibitory mechanisms associated with aging could account for age-related differen...