Distinguishing Target From Distractor in Stroop, Picture-Word, and Word-Word Interference Tasks.

Xenia Schmalz,Barbara Treccani,Claudio Mulatti

doi:10.3389/fpsyg.2015.01858

Xenia Schmalz, Barbara Treccani + Show 1 more

Open Access

https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2015.01858

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Abstract

Lexical selection—both during reading aloud and speech production—involves selecting an intended word, while ignoring irrelevant lexical activation. This process has been studied by the use of interference tasks. Examples are the Stroop task, where participants ignore the written color word and name the color of the ink, picture–word interference tasks, where participants name a picture while ignoring a super-imposed written word, or word–word interference (WWI) tasks, where two words are presented and the participants need to respond to only one, based on an pre-determined visual feature (e.g., color, position). Here, we focus on the WWI task: it is theoretically impossible for existing models to explain how the cognitive system can respond to one stimulus and block the other, when they are presented by the same modality (i.e., they are both words). We describe a solution that can explain performance on the WWI task: drawing on the literature on visual attention, we propose that the system creates an object file for each perceived object, which is continuously updated with increasingly complete information about the stimulus, such as the task-relevant visual feature. Such a model can account for performance on all three tasks.

Highlights

The cognitive system is often confronted with a set of stimuli, where one stimulus requires a response while others need to be ignored
We consider whether existing models of lexical selection can adequately account for performance on three tasks that have been used to study the process of word selection in speech production: the Stroop task (Stroop, 1935; Klein, 1964; MacLeod, 1991), the picture–word interference (PWI) task (La Heij, 1988; Schriefers et al, 1990; Mahon et al, 2007), and the word–word interference (WWI) task (Glaser and Glaser, 1989; Waechter et al, 2011; Mulatti et al, 2015)
We argue that contemporary theories fail to account for performance on the WWI task, as it is theoretically impossible for the system in these models to ignore a distractor of the same type as a target

Summary

INTRODUCTION

The cognitive system is often confronted with a set of stimuli, where one stimulus requires a response while others need to be ignored. We consider whether existing models of lexical selection can adequately account for performance on three tasks that have been used to study the process of word selection in speech production: the Stroop task (Stroop, 1935; Klein, 1964; MacLeod, 1991), the picture–word interference (PWI) task (La Heij, 1988; Schriefers et al, 1990; Mahon et al, 2007), and the word–word interference (WWI) task (Glaser and Glaser, 1989; Waechter et al, 2011; Mulatti et al, 2015) These experimental tasks have in common the process of selecting a target, to which the participant needs to respond (e.g., by reading aloud, a lexical decision, or semantic categorization), and the need to ignore an irrelevant stimulus, the distractor. The task is to respond to only one of the two stimuli simultaneously presented, and so, the system needs to know that a given response corresponds to a given stimulus to decide what to process and what to gate

PREVIOUS SOLUTIONS

AN ALTERNATIVE APPROACH

Orthographic Processing

Interference Tasks and Word Production

Selecting Words During Reading

CONCLUSION