Interlinguistic conflict: Word–word Stroop with first and second language colour words

The congruency (or Stroop) effect is a standard observation of slower and less accurate colour identification to incongruent trials (e.g. “red” in green) relative to congruent trials (e.g. “red” in red). This effect has been observed in a word–word variant of the task, when both the distracter (e.g. “red”) and target (e.g. “green”) are colour words. The Stroop task has also been used to study the congruency effect between two languages in bilinguals. The typical finding is that the congruency effect for L1 words is larger than that for L2 words. For the first time, the present report aims to extend this finding to a word–word variant of the bilingual Stroop task. In two experiments, French monolinguals performed a bilingual word–word Stroop task in which target word language, language match, and congruency between the distracter and target were manipulated. The critical manipulation across two experiments concerned the target language. In Experiment 1, target language was manipulated between groups, with either French (L1) or English (L2) target colour words. In Experiment 2, target words from both languages were intermixed. In both experiments, the congruency effect was larger when the distracter and target were from the same language (language match) than when they were from different languages (language mismatch). Our findings suggested that this congruency effect mostly depends on the language match between the distracter and target, rather than on a target language. It also did not seem to matter whether the language-mismatching distracter was or was not a potential response alternative. Semantic activation of languages in bilinguals and its implications on target identification are discussed.

     

Reversing the affective congruency effect: The role of target word frequency of occurrence

In this research the outcome of an affective priming experiment is shown to critically depend on the frequency of occurrence of the target words used. Low frequency target words (5.7 occurrences per million words) resulted in an affective congruency effect, i.e., faster responses following affectively congruent than incongruent primes. High frequency target words (32.6 occurrences per million) resulted in a reverse priming effect, i.e., faster responses following incongruent than congruent primes. The size of the congruency effect was larger than the size of the reverse priming effect, thus masking its emergence when word frequency was not taken into account. We propose that target word frequency has its influence via an accessibility-related mechanism having to do with differences in observed changes in affect between prime and target.     

Sad or fearful? The influence of body posture on adults’ and children’s perception of facial displays of emotion

The current research investigated the influence of body posture on adults' and children's perception of facial displays of emotion. In each of two experiments, participants categorized facial expressions that were presented on a body posture that was congruent (e.g., a sad face on a body posing sadness) or incongruent (e.g., a sad face on a body posing fear). Adults and 8-year-olds made more errors and had longer reaction times on incongruent trials than on congruent trials when judging sad versus fearful facial expressions, an effect that was larger in 8-year-olds. The congruency effect was reduced when faces and bodies were misaligned, providing some evidence for holistic processing. Neither adults nor 8-year-olds were affected by congruency when judging sad versus happy expressions. Evidence that congruency effects vary with age and with similarity of emotional expressions is consistent with dimensional theories and "emotional seed" models of emotion perception.     

Positive and negative emotions modulate attention allocation in color-flanker task processing: Evidence from event related potentials

The purpose of this study was to explore the effects of emotions in conflict processing. Behavioral and event related potential (ERP) data were acquired from twenty participants while they were performing a color-flanker task, in which the stimuli were emotional and neutral words. Through temporal principal component analysis (PCA) of ERP, three PCA components were extracted with their time windows mapped to three ERP components: N1, N2 and P3. Further analysis revealed, when the stimuli were the positive words, N1 was marginally greater for the congruent condition than for the incongruent condition (p = .06); while the stimuli were the negative words, N1 was greater for the incongruent condition than for the congruent condition (p = .02); however, no significant interaction effect involving the valence of words (positive vs. negative) and the color congruency (congruent vs. incongruent) was found on N2, P3 and the behavior data. The result suggested that negative emotion might lead to more attention allocation in the incongruent processing, while positive emotion might lead to more attention allocation in the congruent processing. Furthermore, ERP source analysis in the present study confirmed anterior cingulate cortex was involved in the conflict monitoring mechanism.     

Gender Stereotype Activation versus Lexical Semantic Activation: An ERP Study

It is an open question whether social stereotype activation can be distinguished from nonsocial semantic activation. To address this question, gender stereotype activation (GSA) and lexical semantic activation (LSA) were directly compared. EEGs were recorded in 20 participants as they identified the congruence between prime-target word pairs under four different conditions (stereotype congruent, stereotype incongruent, semantic congruent, and semantic incongruent). We found that congruent targets elicited faster and more accurate responses and reduced N400 amplitudes irrespective of priming category types. The N400 congruency effect (i.e., the difference between incongruity and congruity) started earlier and had greater amplitude for GSA than for LSA. Moreover, gender category priming induced a smaller N400 and a larger P600 than lexical category priming. These findings suggest that the brain is not only sensitive to both stereotype and semantic violation in the post-perceptual processing stage but can also differentiate these two information processes. Further, the findings suggest superior processing (i.e., faster and deeper processing) when the words are associated with social category and convey stereotype knowledge.     

Processing emotional category congruency between emotional facial expressions and emotional words

Facial expressions are critical for effective social communication, and as such may be processed by the visual system even when it might be advantageous to ignore them. Previous research has shown that categorising emotional words was impaired when faces of a conflicting valence were simultaneously presented. In the present study, we examined whether emotional word categorisation would also be impaired when faces of the same (negative) valence but different emotional category (either angry, sad or fearful) were simultaneously presented. Behavioural results provided evidence for involuntary processing of basic emotional facial expression category, with slower word categorisation when the face and word categories were incongruent (e.g., angry word and sad face) than congruent (e.g., angry word and angry face). Event-related potentials (ERPs) time-locked to the presentation of the word–face pairs also revealed that emotional category congruency effects were evident from approximately 170 ms after stimulus onset.     

Action Understanding in the Superior Temporal Sulcus Region

ABSTRACT— The posterior superior temporal sulcus (STS) region plays an important role in the perception of social acts, although its full role has not been completely clarified. This functional magnetic resonance imaging experiment examined activity in the STS region as participants viewed actions that were congruent or incongruent with intentions established by a previous emotional context. Participants viewed an actress express either a positive or a negative emotion toward one of two objects and then subsequently pick up one of them. If the object that was picked up had received positive regard, or if the object that was not picked up had received negative regard, the action was congruent; otherwise, the action was incongruent. Activity in the right posterior STS region was sensitive to the congruency between the action and the actress's emotional expression (i.e., STS activity was greater on incongruent than on congruent trials). These findings suggest that the posterior STS represents not only biological motion, but also how another person's motion is related to his or her intentions.     

Engaging the motor system with masked orthographic primes: A kinematic analysis

We report two experiments in which participants categorized target words (e.g., BLOOD or CUCUMBER) according to their canonical colour of red or green by pointing to a red square on the left or a green square on the right. Unbeknownst to the participants, the target words were preceded by the prime words “red” or “green”. We found that the curvature of participants’ pointing trajectories was greater following incongruent primes (green–BLOOD) than it was following congruent primes, indicating that individuals initiated a response on the basis of the prime and then corrected that response mid-flight. This finding establishes that the processing of masked orthographic stimuli extends down to include the formulation of an overt manual response.     

情境特异比例一致变化对冲突效应的影响

采用Hedge和Marsh任务与比例一致性操纵相结合,分别以刺激的空间位置和形状作为比例一致操纵的情境线索,考察刺激-反应联结学习与注意调节在比例一致效应中的作用。结果发现,在情境比例一致操纵下,冲突效应的效应量受到比例一致操纵的影响产生反转。表明刺激-反应联结学习在情境特异比例一致效应中起到主要作用。     

内外向者幽默加工进程差异:ERP研究

本研究采用事件相关电位技术(ERP),探究幽默的加工进程及内外向者在加工进程中的差异。研究以笑话为实验材料,要求被试先浏览背景信息和妙句结尾,然后评估先后呈现的文字材料的关系。行为结果:内向者的反应时显著短于外向者。ERP结果:(1)幽默加工过程包括不一致探测阶段、不一致消解阶段和情绪加工阶段。(2)不一致无关的N400波幅显著大于一致不可笑;不一致无关的P600波幅显著小于不一致可笑和一致不可笑;800ms之后不一致可笑引发了比一致不可笑和不一致无关更大的正波幅。(3)内外向者在幽默加工进程上的差异主要体现在幽默加工阶段的早期。与内向者相比,外向者在幽默不一致探测阶段所用的认知资源较少,加工的自动化程度较高。     

Exploring relations between task conflict and informational conflict in the Stroop task

In this study, we tested the proposal that the Stroop task involves two conflicts—task conflict and informational conflict. Task conflict was defined as the latency difference between color words and non-letter neutrals, and manipulated by varying the proportion of color words versus non-letter neutrals. Informational conflict was defined as the latency difference between incongruent and congruent trials and manipulated by varying the congruent-to-incongruent trial ratio. We replicated previous findings showing that increasing the ratio of incongruent-to-congruent trials reduces the latency difference between the incongruent and congruent condition (i.e., informational conflict), as does increasing the proportion of color words (i.e., task conflict). A significant under-additive interaction between the two proportion manipulations (congruent vs. incongruent and color words vs. neutrals) indicated that the effects of task conflict and informational conflict were not additive. By assessing task conflict as the contrast between color words and neutrals, we found that task conflict existed in all of our experimental conditions. Under specific conditions, when task conflict dominated behavior by explaining most of the variability between congruency conditions, we also found negative facilitation, thus demonstrating that this effect is a special case of task conflict.     

Negative priming and stimulus-response compatibility

The subjects in this study made incongruent naming responses to words and pictures that were presented on alternate trials (e.g., say “car” toBIKE). Their response time was longer if the correct response for the current trial was the name of the stimulus presented on the preceding trial, as compared with a control condition. These results suggest that the tendency to produce the (congruent) name of the stimulus is automatically activated and then inhibited. The “negative priming” effects appeared stronger for words where pictures were primes than for pictures where words were primes. The implications of these results for negative priming and stimulus-response compatibility are discussed.     

Emotionality,distinctiveness, and recollective experience

Two experiments investigated the effects of emotional stimuli on recollective experience in recognition memory. In Experiment 1, words judged to evoke a positive emotional response (e.g., warmth, freedom) or a negative emotional response (e.g., mucus, corpse) were associated with more “remember” responses than emotionally neutral words (e.g., crate, border) when presented in mixed lists. This effect was stronger with negative words than with positive words. In Experiment 2 the effects of emotional stimuli were eliminated when participants studied pure lists of either all emotional or all neutral words. These findings are discussed in relation to Rajaram's (1996) distinctiveness account of recollective experience.     

Polarity correspondence in metaphor congruency effects: structural overlap predicts categorization times for bipolar concepts presented in vertical space

Previous research has shown that words presented on metaphor congruent locations (e.g., positive words UP on the screen and negative words DOWN on the screen) are categorized faster than words presented on metaphor incongruent locations (e.g., positive words DOWN and negative words UP). These findings have been explained in terms of an interference effect: The meaning associated with UP and DOWN vertical space can automatically interfere with the categorization of words with a metaphorically incongruent meaning. The current studies test an alternative explanation for the interaction between the vertical position of abstract concepts and the speed with which these stimuli are categorized. Research on polarity differences (basic asymmetries in the way dimensions are processed) predicts that +polar endpoints of dimensions (e.g., positive, moral, UP) are categorized faster than -polar endpoints of dimensions (e.g., negative, immoral, DOWN). Furthermore, the polarity correspondence principle predicts that stimuli where polarities correspond (e.g., positive words presented UP) provide an additional processing benefit compared to stimuli where polarities do not correspond (e.g., negative words presented UP). A meta-analysis (Study 1) shows that a polarity account provides a better explanation of reaction time patterns in previous studies than an interference explanation. An experiment (Study 2) reveals that controlling for the polarity benefit of +polar words compared to -polar words did not only remove the main effect of word polarity but also the interaction between word meaning and vertical position due to polarity correspondence. These results reveal that metaphor congruency effects should not be interpreted as automatic associations between vertical locations and word meaning but instead are more parsimoniously explained by their structural overlap in polarities.     

自动情绪调节对负性情绪面孔注意偏向的影响

本研究通过成语匹配任务启动情绪调节目标,在情绪flanker任务中考察了自动情绪调节启动对注意偏向的影响。结果表明,中性启动条件下,被试表现出对负性情绪面孔的注意偏向,而情绪调节启动条件下,被试对正性、负性情绪面孔的注意分配不存在显著差异。这一结果说明自动情绪调节可以有效地减弱被试的负性情绪面孔注意偏向。     

Electrophysiological responses to evaluative priming: the LPP is sensitive to incongruity

Previous studies examining event-related potentials and evaluative priming have been mixed; some find evidence that evaluative priming influences the N400, whereas others find evidence that it affects the late positive potential (LPP). Three experiments were conducted using either affective pictures (Experiments 1 and 2) or words (Experiment 3) in a sequential evaluative priming paradigm. In line with previous behavioral findings, participants responded slower to targets that were evaluatively incongruent with the preceding prime (e.g., negative preceded by positive) compared to evaluatively congruent targets (e.g., negative preceded by negative). In all three studies, the LPP was larger to evaluatively incongruent targets compared to evaluatively congruent ones, and there was no evidence that evaluative incongruity influenced the N400 component. Thus, the present results provide additional support for the notion that evaluative priming influences the LPP and not the N400. We discuss possible reasons for the inconsistent findings in prior research and the theoretical implications of the findings for both evaluative and semantic priming.     

Processing emotional category congruency between emotional facial expressions and emotional words

Facial expressions are critical for effective social communication, and as such may be processed by the visual system even when it might be advantageous to ignore them. Previous research has shown that categorising emotional words was impaired when faces of a conflicting valence were simultaneously presented. In the present study, we examined whether emotional word categorisation would also be impaired when faces of the same (negative) valence but different emotional category (either angry, sad or fearful) were simultaneously presented. Behavioural results provided evidence for involuntary processing of basic emotional facial expression category, with slower word categorisation when the face and word categories were incongruent (e.g., angry word and sad face) than congruent (e.g., angry word and angry face). Event-related potentials (ERPs) time-locked to the presentation of the word-face pairs also revealed that emotional category congruency effects were evident from approximately 170 ms after stimulus onset.     

记忆编码中目标与背景的情绪一致性对记忆提取的影响

摘 要 本研究将经典情绪启动范式和学习-再认范式相结合,探讨学习时启动与目标的情绪一致性对目标再认的影响。在记忆编码阶段,以情绪面孔图片为启动刺激、一般情绪图片为目标刺激,要求被试对目标图片的效价进行判断;在提取阶段向被试呈现一般情绪图片,要求被试判断是否在前一阶段见过。结果表明,编码阶段的加工背景对记忆提取产生了显著影响。一致启动促进了认知加工与记忆编码,提高了再认正确率。ERP结果也表明,在目标刺激呈现后300-500ms,编码时的情绪一致性对再认阶段消极目标诱发的ERP产生了显著影响。     

RETRACTED ARTICLE: Losing control: Mostly incongruent lists postpone,but do not eliminate,the Stroop effect

Identifying the color (e.g., red) of a color word that is incongruent (e.g., “BLUE”) can be remarkably difficult. The Stroop effect is a measure of the interference between activity from word and color pathways. The efficacy of these pathways is thought to be highly contingent on the frequency of incongruent trials within a block. A block of trials with mostly incongruent (MI) trials typically results in a smaller Stroop effect than a block with mostly congruent (MC) trials. This reduction of the Stroop effect has been largely attributed to the strategic list-wide control of the word pathway. Here, the time course of the Stroop effect was explored using speed-accuracy tradeoff functions (SATfs) in tasks with 50 % congruent, MC, and MI trials. In the MC and 50 % congruent condition, color-word congruency affected the rate parameter of the SATf. In the MI condition, however, congruency affected the asymptote. This evidence is consistent with the idea that the strategic control of the word pathway is an effortful, temporary phenomenon, prone to buckle if responding is held in check.     

Gradual proportion congruent effects in the absence of sequential congruent effects

In perceptual filtering tasks, congruency effects vary as a function of proportion congruent (PC), with smaller congruency effects when congruent trials are rare than when they are frequent. This effect is typically larger with extreme differences between high and low proportion congruent conditions (e.g., 80% congruent–20% incongruent) than with intermediate differences (e.g., 60% congruent–40% incongruent; Logan & Zbofroff, 1979; Blais & Bunge, 2010). Some authors have claimed that both PC effects can be explained in terms of the same reactive cognitive control mechanism that is responsible for sequential congruency (SC) effects (e.g., Botvinick, Braver, Barch, Carter, & Cohen, 2001). In fact, in most previous studies there was a systematic confounding between proportion congruent and the proportion of transitions involving an incongruent trial followed by another incongruent trial. In the present study we eliminated this confound and tested directly whether PC effects can still be measured in the absence of SC effects. Once confirmed, we studied the properties of this pure form of PC effect, in particular whether it is conflict-type specific or general, and whether it decreases gradually as a function of changes in proportion congruency (80% vs. 70% vs. 60%). Our results showed significant PC effects in the absence of SC effects, which replicates our previous findings (Torres-Quesada, Milliken, Lupiáñez, & Funes, 2014), and PC effects that can be conflict-type general or specific, depending on the nature of conflict type where they were produced. Importantly, the congruency effect was modulated by the level of proportion congruent, decreasing systematically as the absolute percentage of incongruent trials decreases.