Studies of Interference in Serial Verbal Reactions

Studies of Interference in Serial Verbal Reactions J. Ridley Stroop

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Studies of Interference in Serial Verbal Reactions 1935 Journal of Experimental Psychology 10.1037/h0054651 stroop1935-interference stroop1935-interference.txt, the project's staged copy a013b2d8512acdd96c69c5a32cc2568c406e5003 personal-copy cognitive-psychology

the paper's own words

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0 spans located by searching the stored text for the quote's exact words, allowing any whitespace between them existence Quotation withheld because this record is not cleared for redistribution. color-word interference Quotation withheld because this record is not cleared for redistribution. behavioural-experiment behavioural-experiment Quotation withheld because this record is not cleared for redistribution. mechanisms interference from automaticity: the highly-practiced automatic response (reading a word) competes with a slower, less-automatic response (naming the ink color), so conflicting color words slow color naming - the Stroop effect Quotation withheld because this record is not cleared for redistribution. in one condition (reading incongruently-colored color names) the observed difference was not statistically reliable what this limits: the reading-incongruent condition specifically: THIS DIFFERENCE IS NOT RELIABLE, WHICH IS IN AGREEMENT WITH PETERSON'S PREDICTION MADE WHEN THE TEST WAS FIRST PROPOSED Quotation withheld because this record is not cleared for redistribution. The scheme used to penalise uncorrected errors was chosen arbitrarily rather than derived from an objective measure. what this limits: every reported time: THIS PLAN OF CORRECTION WAS ARBITRARY BUT SEEMED TO BE JUSTIFIED BY THE SITUATION Quotation withheld because this record is not cleared for redistribution. No accurate objective correction for uncorrected errors was available. what this limits: the same scope as limitations[1], with the reason: SINCE NO ACCURATE OBJECTIVE MEASURE WAS OBTAINABLE AND THE NUMBER OF ERRORS WAS SMALL THE ARBITRARY PLAN WAS ADOPTED Quotation withheld because this record is not cleared for redistribution. Only the first two college-year groups had enough cases to support comparison. what this limits: any comparison across college years: ONLY COLLEGE YEARS ONE AND TWO CONTAIN A SUFFICIENT NUMBER OF CASES FOR COMPARATIVE PURPOSES Quotation withheld because this record is not cleared for redistribution. the colour order constructed so that no colour repeats consecutively in a row or column, and each appears TWICE in every row and column eliminates: regularity of occurrence - a predictable sequence lets the reader anticipate the next colour, so a naming-speed difference would measure prediction rather than interference. Balancing across rows and columns also equalises how often each colour is named · outcome (stated by the tagger, no quotation): held Quotation withheld because this record is not cleared for redistribution. interference interference Quotation withheld because this record is not cleared for redistribution. word stimuli word stimuli Quotation withheld because this record is not cleared for redistribution. color stimuli color stimuli Quotation withheld because this record is not cleared for redistribution. training training Quotation withheld because this record is not cleared for redistribution. practice practice Quotation withheld because this record is not cleared for redistribution. THE ASYMMETRY WITH BOTH HALVES, WHICH IS THE FINDING - NOT THE HALF THAT GETS QUOTED: `The interference of conflicting color stimuli upon the time for reading 100 words ... caused an increase of only 2.3 seconds or 5.6 percent over the normal time for reading the same words printed in black. This increase is not reliable. But the interference of conflicting word stimuli upon the time for naming 100 colors ... caused an increase of 47.0 seconds or 74.3 percent.` One direction is a null and the other is enormous. A record that holds only `colour-word interference` has half of this paper; the whole of it is that interference runs one way and not the other, and that fact is what needs explaining Quotation withheld because this record is not cleared for redistribution. AND STROOP'S EXPLANATION IS A TRAINING HISTORY, NOT AN ARCHITECTURE: `Quotation withheld.` One-to-one against one-to-many. Not automaticity, not a module, not a race between pathways - a difference in how many responses each stimulus class has been attached to over a lifetime. It is in the paper's own SUMMARY, not buried in a discussion - and because it is a claim about learning rather than about structure, it is testable by training, which is exactly what Stroop then does in Experiment 3. (An earlier version of this note said the training account is 'the part later citation usually loses'. I had not measured that and cannot from one record: the corpus holds 7 records mentioning Stroop, which is no base for 'usually', and counting how often those records say 'automatic' measures their own topics rather than what they attribute to him. Retracted 2026-08-19) Quotation withheld because this record is not cleared for redistribution. AND HE TESTED IT THE ONLY WAY THAT COULD SETTLE IT - BY TRAINING THE NULL DIRECTION UNTIL IT STOPPED BEING NULL. Eight days, 200 reactions a day, naming the colours of conflicting words: `1. It DECREASED the interference of conflicting word stimuli to naming colors but did not eliminate it. ... 5. It increased the interference of conflicting color stimuli upon reading words.` The direction that was `not reliable` became reliable once it was trained, and the direction that was enormous shrank. That is the training account making a prediction and collecting it, and it is stronger evidence than the headline asymmetry it explains Quotation withheld because this record is not cleared for redistribution. AND THE INTERFERENCE HE BUILT DECAYED FASTER THAN THE ONE HE FOUND, WHICH IS A SEPARATE CLAIM: `Quotation withheld.` A trained interference is real but shallow; the lifetime one is not. Age of an association, not just its strength - and it is measured here in 1935 with a stopwatch Quotation withheld because this record is not cleared for redistribution. builds-on → prior experimental research on interference and inhibition Quotation withheld because this record is not cleared for redistribution. replicates → Woodworth-Wells (1911), Brown (1915) and Ligon (1932) on the sex difference in colour naming Quotation withheld because this record is not cleared for redistribution. builds-on → Peterson and Barlow's (1928) hypothesis about practice and individual differences Quotation withheld because this record is not cleared for redistribution. builds-on → Peterson's prediction about the reading of colour names printed in conflicting colours Quotation withheld because this record is not cleared for redistribution. word stimuli —causes→ interference word stimuli interference direction on the measure: increases · strength of the relation: 0.95 · note: THE EFFECT THE PAPER IS REMEMBERED FOR, at 4.35 standard deviation units. Weight 0.95: the number, the comparison condition and the reliability are all in the paper's own summary. The edge that matters is the OTHER one - this one alone is the half-quoted version. Quotation withheld because this record is not cleared for redistribution. color stimuli —causes→ interference color stimuli interference direction on the measure: no-change · strength of the relation: 0.95 · note: 'no-change' ON A 5.6 PERCENT INCREASE, BECAUSE STROOP SAYS 'This increase is not reliable' AND THAT SENTENCE IS INSIDE THE QUOTE. The point estimate is positive; the paper declines to treat it as an effect. Recording it as 'increases' because the number is above zero would contradict the author, and dropping the edge would lose the half of the finding that needs explaining. Read with the edge above, this pair IS the Stroop asymmetry - and the third sense shows the null becoming reliable after eight days of training, which is what makes it a fact about learning rather than about colour. Quotation withheld because this record is not cleared for redistribution. practice —causes→ interference practice interference direction on the measure: increases · strength of the relation: 0.9 · note: THIS IS THE TRAINING ACCOUNT BEING COLLECTED RATHER THAN ASSERTED. Eight days of naming the colours of conflicting words INCREASED the interference running the other way - the direction Experiment 1 had found 'not reliable'. 'due to' is Stroop's own attribution and it is in the quote. Weight 0.9: a measured within-subject change with the manipulation named, against 0.85 for the interpretive sentence where he says it 'seems reasonable to conclude' that differential training explains the asymmetry. The explanation is the 'training' concept; this edge is the test of it. Quotation withheld because this record is not cleared for redistribution. 70 — subjects in Experiment I (14 male, 56 female) Quotation withheld because this record is not cleared for redistribution. 200 — reactions each subject made per test Quotation withheld because this record is not cleared for redistribution. 2.3 — extra time to read 100 color names in conflicting ink Quotation withheld because this record is not cleared for redistribution. 638 — Ligon's genetic-study sample across grades 1-9 Quotation withheld because this record is not cleared for redistribution. the difference was not reliable, in agreement with Peterson's prediction Quotation withheld because this record is not cleared for redistribution. naming colors takes more time than reading color names Quotation withheld because this record is not cleared for redistribution. the color naming vs word reading speed gap does not depend on practice about this quote: THE QUOTE IS BROWN'S (1915) CONCLUSION, WHICH THIS PAPER CITES - it is not a finding of this paper's own experiments, and the paper's own conclusion accounts for the difference in speed by the difference in training in reading and in naming. Quotation withheld because this record is not cleared for redistribution. a prior association can interfere with forming an opposite one Quotation withheld because this record is not cleared for redistribution. interference of color stimuli upon reading words interference of color stimuli upon reading words Quotation withheld because this record is not cleared for redistribution. increase in time increase in time Quotation withheld because this record is not cleared for redistribution. recall power recall power about this quote: QUOTE RECOVERED FROM THE PAPER'S OWN CHARACTERS. The recorded quote was LETTERS-ONLY IDENTICAL to this stretch of the staged text but not an exact substring of it - spaces, hyphens, ligature glyphs or mathematical operators differed, so it could never anchor. This is the file's own text between the same two letters: not produced by a rule about the damage, copied out of the file. Round-trip checked (the recovered span is letters-only equal to the original) and length-checked. The text as originally recorded is kept in evidence as extracted. Quotation withheld because this record is not cleared for redistribution. conflicting stimuli conflicting stimuli Quotation withheld because this record is not cleared for redistribution. associative inhibition associative inhibition Quotation withheld because this record is not cleared for redistribution. RCNd RCNd Quotation withheld because this record is not cleared for redistribution. RCNb RCNb Quotation withheld because this record is not cleared for redistribution. interference or inhibition interference or inhibition Quotation withheld because this record is not cleared for redistribution. mean mean Quotation withheld because this record is not cleared for redistribution. median median Quotation withheld because this record is not cleared for redistribution. standard-deviation standard-deviation Quotation withheld because this record is not cleared for redistribution.

The full text of this article is not redistributable, so it is not included here. The evidence sentences are withheld with it; the tag layer and its grounding status remain. The article itself is at https://doi.org/10.1037/h0054651.