What Stroop tasks can tell us about selective attention from childhood to adulthood

Abstract

A rich body of research concerns causes of Stroop effects plus applications of Stroop. However, several questions remain. We included assessment of errors with children and adults (N=316), who sat either a task wherein each block employed only trials of one type (unmixed task) or where every block comprised of a mix of the congruent, neutral and incongruent trials. Children responded slower than adults and made more errors on each task. Contrary to some previous studies, interference (the difference between neutral & incongruent condition), showed no RT differences by group or task, although there were differences in errors. By contrast, facilitation (the difference between neutral & congruent condition), was greater in children than adults, and greater on the unmixed task than the mixed task. After considering a number of theoretical accounts, we settle on the inadvertent word-reading hypothesis, whereby facilitation stems from children and the unmixed task promoting inadvertent reading particularly in the congruent condition. Stability of interference RT is explained by fixed semantic differences between neutral and incongruent condition, for children v adults and for unmixed v mixed task. We conclude that utilising two tasks together, may reveal more about how attention is affected in other groups.