THE STROOP EFFECT AND THE MYTH OF AUTOMATICITY

A widespread view in cognition is that once acquired through extensive practice, mental skills such as reading are automatic. Lexical and se mantic analyses of single words are said to be uncontrollable in the s ense that they cannot be prevented. Over the past 60 years, apparently convincing support for this assumption has come from hundreds of expe riments in which skilled readers have processed an irrelevant word in the Stroop task despite explicit instructions not to, even when so doi ng would hurt color identification performance. This basic effect was replicated in two experiments, which also showed that a considerable a mount of semantic processing is locally controlled by elements of the task. For example, simply coloring a single letter instead of the whol e word eliminated the Stroop effect. This outcome flies in the face of any automaticity account in which specified processes cannot be preve nted from being set in motion, but it is consistent with the venerable idea that mental set is a powerful determinant of performance.