Najenson Jonathan, Zaks-Ohayon Rut, Tzelgov Joseph, Fresco Nir
Department of Philosophy, Ruhr-Universität Bochum, 44780, Bochum, Germany.
Mental Health Institute of Beer-Sheva, Ministry of Health, Beer-Sheva, Israel.
Mem Cognit. 2025 Jan 25. doi: 10.3758/s13421-024-01677-7.
The Stroop task is widely used to study attentional control and cognitive flexibility. However, questions about its sensitivity to training and the impact of task conflict on attentional control remain open. We investigated the effects of practice and task conflict on attentional control in the Stroop task, with participants completing four sessions of a Stroop task over 3 weeks in low and high task-conflict conditions. Our results show that the level of task conflict had an impact only in the first session, even though participants remained sensitive to task conflict throughout all four sessions. Moreover, we found that practice reduced response times in the Stroop task, for both congruent and incongruent trials. Nevertheless, the interference between congruent and incongruent stimuli remained consistent over the 3-week period, indicating that inter-condition interference is not affected by training. Our study, therefore, suggests that the extent to which the level of task conflict modulates Stroop task performance is only partially sensitive to training. These findings provide further insights into the role of task conflict and practice in attentional control and cognitive flexibility.
斯特鲁普任务被广泛用于研究注意力控制和认知灵活性。然而，关于其对训练的敏感性以及任务冲突对注意力控制的影响等问题仍未解决。我们研究了练习和任务冲突对斯特鲁普任务中注意力控制的影响，参与者在低任务冲突和高任务冲突条件下，于3周内完成了四节斯特鲁普任务课程。我们的结果表明，任务冲突水平仅在第一节产生影响，尽管参与者在所有四节课程中都对任务冲突保持敏感。此外，我们发现练习减少了斯特鲁普任务中的反应时间，无论是一致试验还是不一致试验。然而，在这3周期间，一致和不一致刺激之间的干扰保持一致，这表明条件间干扰不受训练影响。因此，我们的研究表明，任务冲突水平调节斯特鲁普任务表现的程度仅部分受训练影响。这些发现为任务冲突和练习在注意力控制和认知灵活性中的作用提供了进一步的见解。
