Abstract
A portion of Stroop interference is thought to arise from a failure to maintain goal-oriented behaviour (or goal neglect). The aim of the present study was to investigate whether goal- relevant primes could enhance goal maintenance and reduce the Stroop interference effect. Here it is shown that primes related to the goal of responding quickly in the Stroop task (e.g. fast, quick, hurry) substantially reduced Stroop interference by reducing reaction times to incongruent trials but increasing reaction times to congruent and neutral trials. No effects of the primes were observed on errors. The effects on incongruent, congruent and neutral trials are explained in terms of the influence of the primes on goal maintenance. The results show that goal priming can facilitate goal-oriented behaviour and indicate that automatic processing can modulate executive control.
Highlights
The Stroop task requires participants to identify the colour of the font in which a word is presented, whilst ignoring the word itself [1,2]
Pairedsamples t-tests revealed that reaction times to incongruent trials were significantly reduced by the primes (t(47) = 2.404, p,.05, r = .33), but the reaction times to both the congruent and neutral trials were significantly increased by the primes (t(47) = 2.162, p,.05, r = .3; t(47) = 2.182, p,.05, r = .3, respectively)
The results showed that the goal primes significantly reduced Stroop interference by decreasing reaction times (RTs) to incongruent trials and increasing RTs to neutral trials
Summary
The Stroop task requires participants to identify the colour of the font in which a word is presented, whilst ignoring the word itself [1,2]. De Jong et al argued that goal focus (focus on responding quickly and accurately) is improved with a shorter RSI because the task goal is still strongly activated when the response is needed on the subsequent trial, whereas a longer RSI leads to a neglect of the goal, resulting in larger Stroop effects They reasoned that instead of the more generally accepted notion that interference results from fundamental limits to inhibitory capacity resulting in response competition, interference might mainly be the result of a failure to fully engage or consistently exploit inhibitory abilities. The ability to control and guide novel behaviour is dependent on stable, sustained goal representations
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