Automaticity and Word Perception: Evidence from Stroop and Stroop Dilution Effects

The Stroop effect is cut in half by adding a neutral word to the display. D. Kahneman and D. Chajczyk's (1983) "attention capture" account of "Stroop dilution" holds word recognition to be involuntary but strictly serial. The authors compared attention capture to 3 alternatives involving parallel rather than serial processing: In the lexicon, activation is divided among multiple words; postlexically, multiple words race for access to response processes; or prelexically, feature processing is degraded by multiple patterns whether or not they are words. Results support the latter. Multiple patterns are processed in parallel. If any are color words, Stroop effects occur but are reduced because any color word's input to lexical memory is lower in quality than if a single color word were the only pattern. Thus, lexical encoding is involuntary but can operate on several input representations in parallel, with effectiveness determined by input quality.