Attentional Interference in Relation to the Stroop Effect :: essays research papers

Interference and facilitation ar two important aspects of self-loading fermentes. Interference refers to the range to which one process encumbers performance of another, whereas facilitation indicates the extent to which one process assists performance of another.Through set and maturation, exercise progresses from a controlled process to one that is self-winding, lessening the demands on attentional resources. Stroop reported one of the first studies, which provided support for this, in 1935. He shed the explicate determination/property dimensions in the same stimulus to seduce one of the most researched phenomena in cognitive psychology The Stroop effect (MacLeod, 1991). He found that it was faster to read intelligence informations than it was to name the corresponding object or their properties, including their coloration. Due to its key in understanding attention, the study that chip in to many other related investigations, originated by examining interceptnce in r eading automaticity. Stroop furthered his research by creating tasks involving color designation and reading. He first compared the quantify it took to read color names printed in incongruent ink colourise to a base line reading of color words. For the here and now function of his study, Stroop compared the time it took to name the ink color when congruent with the color word (e.g., blue printed in blue ink) to the time it took to name the ink color.By comparing the response times in the interference conditions to the control conditions he found that it took people longer to respond to the color of the ink when printed in a color incongruent to the color word (Stroop, 1995). The words interfere with naming the color yet, the color does not interfere with reading the word.The record of the Stroop effect results as a consequence of automaticity. People have difficulty ignoring the meaning of a word because, through practice, reading has become an automatic process. The two main explanations accounting for the Stroop effect in the past have been cognitive attentional processes involved in learning, controlled and automatic. As previously mentioned, when a process is automatic (for example reading), it is not only faster it as well as does not rely on other cognitive resources. Controlled processes, for example color naming, are slow and demand more attentional resources. The theory is that an automatic process cannot successfully suppressed without causing interference of a controlled process. The second explanation, relative speed of processing, argues that the two processes involved in color naming and word reading are accomplished in parallel, but that word reading is carried out faster, assuming that the faster process will thence interfere with the slower ones such as color naming (Dunbar and McLeod, 1984 as cited in Mel, 1997)