The literature on interference in the Stroop Color-Word Task, covering over 50 years and some 400 studies, is organized and reviewed. In so doing, a set ofl 8 reliable empirical findings is isolated that must be captured by any successful theory of the Stroop effect. Existing theoretical positions are summarized and evaluated in view of this critical evidence and the 2 major candidate theories--relative speed of processing and automaticity of reading--are found to be wanting. It is concluded that recent theories placing the explanatory weight on parallel processing of the irrelevant and the relevant dimensions are likely to be more successful than are earlier theories attempting to locate a single bottleneck in attention. In 1935, J. R. Stroop published his landmark article on attention and interference, an article more influential now than it was then. Why has the Stroop task continued to fascinate us? Perhaps the task is seen as tapping into the primitive operations of cognition, offering clues to the fundamental process of attention. Perhaps the robustness of the phenomenon provides a special challenge to decipher. Together these are powerful attractions

The present research examines the nature of the interference effects in a number of selective attention tasks. All of these tasks result in interference in performance by presenting information that is irrelevant to task performance but competes for selection. The interference from this competing information slows the response time (RT) of participants relative to a condition where the competition is minimized. We use a convolution of an exponential and a Gaussian (ex-Gaussian) distribution to examine the influence of interference on the characteristics of RT distributions. Consistent with previous research, we show that interference in the Stroop task is reflected by both the Gaussian and exponential portions of the exGaussian. In contrast, in four experiments we show that several other interference tasks evidence interference that is reflected only in the Gaussian portion of the ex-Gaussian distribution. We suggest that these difference reflect the operation of different selection me...

Development and early focal brain injury 2 Over the past ten years, we have made significant progress in addressing key questions concerning deficit and development after early stroke. We found evidence of subtle early impairment and subsequent development in each domain examined. However, the profiles of impairment and development differed across domains. Deficits of language acquisition are initially pervasive in that they are observed following injury to widely distributed brain areas. Spatial analytic deficits exhibit more specific patterns of brain-behavior association, similar to those observed among adults with injury to comparable brain regions. Had we been working in isolation, the separate investigators associated with this project may have reached very different conclusions about the nature of development following early injury. Instead, we were forced to look for ways to resolve the apparent disparity in our cross-domain findings. The model that best fits our data focuses on redefining the nature of early plasticity. Recent animal studies provide strong evidence that plasticity plays a central role in brain development. Brain organization is to a large extent