The Musical Stroop Effect

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Abstract

The usual color-word Stroop task, as well as most other Stroop-like paradigms, has provided invaluable information on the automaticity of word reading. However, investigating automaticity through reading alone has inherent limitations. This study explored whether a Stroop-like effect could be obtained by replacing word reading with note naming in musicians. Note naming shares with word reading the crucial advantage of being intensively practiced over years by musicians, hence allowing to investigate levels of automatism that are out of reach of laboratory settings. But the situation provides much greater flexibility in manipulating practice. For instance, even though training in musical notation is often conducted in parallel with the acquisition of literacy skills during childhood, many exceptions make that it can be easily decoupled from age. Supporting the possibility of exploiting note naming as a new tool for investigating automatisms, musicians asked to process note names written inside note pictures in incongruent positions on a staff were significantly slowed down in both a go/no-go task (Experiment 1) and a verbal task (Experiment 2) with regard to a condition in which note names were printed inside note pictures in congruent positions.

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Interdimensional interference in the Stroop effect: uncovering the cognitive and neural anatomy of attention.

Angie Macdonald, Les MacLeod (2000)

In the classic Stroop effect, naming the color of an incompatible color word (e.g. the word RED printed in green ink; say, 'green') is much slower and more error-prone than is naming the color of a control item (e.g. XXX or CAT printed in green; say 'green'). This seemingly simple interference phenomenon has long provided a fertile testing ground for theories of the cognitive and neural components of selective attention. We present a sketch of the behavioral phenomenon, focusing on the idea that the relative automaticity of the two dimensions determines the direction and the degree of interdimensional interference between them. We then present an outline of current parallel processing explanations that instantiate this automaticity account, and we show how existing interference data are captured by such models. We also consider how Stroop facilitation (faster response of 'red' to RED printed in red) can be understood. Along the way, we describe research on two tasks that have emerged from the basic Stroop phenomenon - negative priming and the emotional Stroop task. Finally, we provide a survey of brain imaging research, highlighting the possible roles of the anterior cingulate in maintaining attentional set and in processing conflict or competition situations.