title: Individual differences in Stroop dilution: tests of the attention-capture hypothesis.
abstract: Kahneman and Chajczyk (1983) found that naming a colored bar was slowed when a color word was nearby but that this decrement was reduced when a neutral word was also present. This has been referred to as the dilution effect. They accounted for their results with an attention-capture hypothesis. Response time distributions to stimuli that contained a color word and a neutral word within individuals were examined. The dilution effect did not appear within individuals. Some individuals exhibited strong Stroop interference effects, whereas others exhibited no interference. Experiment 2 showed that the interference pattern within individuals was consistent across days. Experiment 3 showed that performance could not be explained by a selection strategy that was based on word length. These experiments showed that performance in a color-plus-neutral word condition reflects a systematic pattern of interference or noninterference that varies across individuals.
authors.affiliation: Department of Psychology, University of Washington, Seattle 98195.
authors.forename: P L
authors.initials: PL
authors.lastname: Yee
authors.forename: E
authors.initials: E
authors.lastname: Hunt
mesh_terms: D001288:Attention; D003118:Color Perception; D006801:Humans; D007206:Individuality; D011939:Mental Recall; D011601:Psychophysics; D011930:Reaction Time; D011932:Reading; D012660:Semantics