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Coloring an action: Intending to produce color events eliminates the Stroop effect

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Abstract

The implications of an ideomotor approach to action control were investigated. In Experiment 1, participants made manual responses to letter stimuli and they were presented with response-contingent color patches, i.e., colored action effects. This rendered stimuli of the same color as an action’s effect effective primes of that action, suggesting that bilateral associations were created between actions and the effects they produced. Experiment 2 combined this set-up with a manual Stroop task, i.e., participants responded to congruent, neutral, or incongruent color-word compounds. Standard Stroop effects were observed in a control group without action effects and in a group with target-incompatible action effects, but the reaction time Stroop effect was eliminated if actions produced target-compatible color effects (e.g., blue word→left key→blue patch). Experiment 3 did not replicate this interaction between target-effect compatibility and color-word congruency with color words as action effects, which rules out semantically based accounts. Theoretical implications for both action-effect acquisition and the Stroop effect are discussed. It is suggested that learning action effects, the features of which overlap with the target, allows and motivates people to recode their actions in ways that make them more stimulus-compatible. This provides a processing shortcut for translating the relevant stimulus into the correct response and, thus, shields processing from the impact of competing word distractors.

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Fig. 1A–C
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Fig. 4A, B

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Notes

  1. Alternatively, one might argue that action effects have a stronger impact on the association between target and response because they are both colors and, thus, share format and modality. This reasoning—which we will find again in the discussion of translation models—would imply the exactly opposite outcome, i.e., the compatible-mapping group should produce the smallest Stroop effect. However, neither version of the dimensional overlap model or any of the interactive action models discussed address the issue of format- or modality-specific stimulus-response overlap (see Lu, 1997, for a broader discussion), which renders this kind of reasoning overly speculative. However, Sugg and McDonald (1994) have presented a hybrid model combining aspects of the Cohen et al. (1990) model with aspects of translation models à la Glaser and Glaser (1989), and this model would be well equipped to deal with format-specific effects.

  2. It is an interesting question whether the codes for left and blue (and for right and green) can also become directly associated. This hypothesis is not only suggested by a generalization of the action-concept approach (Hommel, Müsseler, Aschersleben, & Prinz, 2001), it also seems to stand empirical testing (Hommel & Colzato, in press; Hommel, 1998b, 2003b).

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Acknowledgements

This research was supported by the Max-Planck Institute for Psychological Research, Munich, and by a grant of the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (Priority Program on Executive Functions, HO 1430/8-1). I wish to thank Irmgard Hagen, Tijmen Moerland, Shalu Saini, Helen Tibboel, and Menno van der Woude for collecting the data; as well as Peter Wolff and Peter Wühr for constructive and insightful comments and suggestions.

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  1. Department of Psychology, Cognitive Psychology Unit, Leiden University, Postbus 9555, 2300 RB, Leiden, The Netherlands

    Bernhard Hommel

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Hommel, B. Coloring an action: Intending to produce color events eliminates the Stroop effect. Psychological Research 68, 74–90 (2004). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00426-003-0146-5

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