AUTOMATICITY AND WORD PERCEPTION - EVIDENCE FROM STROOP AND STROOP DILUTION EFFECTS

The Stroop effect is cut in half by adding a neutral word to the displ ay. D. Kahneman and D. Chajczyk's (1983) ''attention capture'' account of ''Stroop dilution'' holds word recognition to be involuntary but s trictly serial. The authors compared attention capture to 3 alternativ es involving parallel rather than serial processing: In the lexicon, a ctivation is divided among multiple words; postlexically, multiple wor ds race for access to response processes; or prelexically, feature pro cessing is degraded by multiple patterns whether or not they are words . Results support the latter. Multiple patterns are processed in paral lel. If any are color words, Stroop effects occur but are reduced beca use any color word's input to lexical memory is lower in quality than if a single color word were the only pattern. Thus, lexical encoding i s involuntary but can operate on several input representations in para llel, with effectiveness determined by input quality.