The effects of stimulus-response mapping and irrelevant stimulus-response and stimulus-stimulus overlap in four-choice stroop tasks with single-carrier stimuli

The purpose of this study was to investigate whether and how stimulus-stimulus (SS) and stimulus-response (SR) consistency and SR congruence effects combine to produce the Stroop effect. Two experiments were conducted with 4-choice tasks in which SS and SR consistency and SR congruence effects were examined in isolation as well as in the Stroop task. The experiments were so designed as to remove the confound between SS and SR consistency that is ordinarily found in standard Stroop tasks and to pit SS consistency against the logical recoding hypothesis (A. Hedge & N. W.A. Marsh, 1975). The results indicate that SS and SR consistency both contribute to the Stroop effect and that they interact. This finding supports models such as the dimensional overlap model (e.g., S. Kornblum & J. W. Lee, 1995) that distinguish between SS and SR overlap. Simulation results from an interactive activation network, modeled after the dimensional overlap model, provide reasonable fits to the experimental data.