Cognition and Perception Unit, Psychology Department, University of Waterloo Waterloo, ON, Canada.
Front Psychol. 2015 Feb 10;6:117. doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2015.00117. eCollection 2015.
It is widely accepted that the presentation of a printed word "automatically" triggers processing that ends with full semantic activation. This processing, among other characteristics, is held to occur without intention, and cannot be stopped. The results of the present experiment show that this account is problematic in the context of a variant of the Stroop paradigm. Subjects named the print color of words that were either neutral or semantically related to color. When the letters were all colored, all spatially cued, and the spaces between letters were filled with characters from the top of the keyboard (i.e., 4, #, 5, %, 6, and *), color naming yielded a semantically based Stroop effect and a semantically based negative priming effect. In contrast, the same items yielded neither a semantic Stroop effect nor a negative priming effect when a single target letter was uniquely colored and spatially cued. These findings (a) undermine the widespread view that lexical-semantic activation in word reading is automatic in the sense that it occurs without intention and cannot be derailed, and (b) strengthens the case that both implicit and explicit forms of visual word recognition require spatial attention as a necessary preliminary to lexical-semantic processing.
人们普遍认为，印刷单词的呈现“自动”触发以完全语义激活结束的处理。这种处理除其他特征外，被认为是在没有意图的情况下发生的，并且无法停止。本实验的结果表明，在斯特鲁普范式的一种变体的背景下，这种说法存在问题。被试命名单词的印刷颜色，这些单词要么是中性的，要么与颜色有关。当字母全部着色、全部空间提示且字母之间的空间填充有来自键盘顶部的字符（即 4、#、5、%、6 和 *）时，颜色命名会产生基于语义的斯特鲁普效应和基于语义的负启动效应。相比之下，当单个目标字母被独特着色和空间提示时，相同的项目既不会产生语义斯特鲁普效应，也不会产生负启动效应。这些发现 (a) 破坏了广泛存在的观点，即阅读单词中的词汇语义激活是自动的，因为它是在没有意图的情况下发生的，并且无法改变；(b) 加强了这样一种观点，即视觉单词识别的隐含和显式形式都需要空间注意力作为词汇语义处理的必要前提。
