For human beings, the ability to read was a skill developed through consistent rehearsal and practice. Reading itself is defined by a complex cognitive process involving the use of phrases, memories, knowledge, and words that all work together to achieve a comprehension of the text. Reading is a complex cognitive process that deals with perception, reasoning, memory, and problem solving. Because of these qualities, reading has been used specifically in clinical studies to measure processing speed, cognitive control, flexibility, selective attention, and automatic processing. According to Moors (2006), since reading cannot be turned off, when participants are asked to not read words, they are unable to comply given the automatic nature of reading (Moors, 2006).
Therefore, semantic interference plays a role in the automatic processing of reading. In a study done by John Ridley Stroop(1935), suggested that participants are quicker to read the neutral stimuli compared to the incongruent stimuli. Stroop called this effect the semantic interference due to the fact that reading is an automatic process. Stroop realized that this automatic processing would play a critical role in offering insight into the functioning of the human brain so he designed an experiment that would make use of the effect of incongruent words. In the experiment, participants were instructed to read a list of words that described different colors, but the words themselves were colored a different color than the words they were describing. For example, the word “green” would be written in text but printed in blue (Stroop, 1935).
Participants were required to say the color that the word was in but not the colors it described. For example, if the word “yellow” was printed in red, the participant would have to read it as “red”(Stroop, 1935). The results of the experiment showed that participants would have a harder time reading out loud the color of the word. These findings suggest that participants are slower at identifying tasks with the presence of an incongruent condition compared to a neutral stimuli (Stroop, 1935). A study done by Rosinski et al.,(1975) also investigated the automatic semantic processing of picture-word interference task. The interference in this experiment is the use of a different semantic that was not from the same category. Participants for this experiment were second and sixth grader who were classified as average or above in reading ability (Rosinski et al., 1975).
College student were also participants of this experiment. Half of the participants were instructed to read the words instead of naming the picture. For example, a picture of a “seal” will be presented with the word of “seal”(Rosinski et al., 1975). Half were asked to name the picture instead of reading the words. For example, a picture of “key” will be displayed with the word of “sock”(Rosinski et al., 1975). Response time to complete the task was recorded. The results showed that participants in the interference condition (the word depict the picture) had a collectively longer response time than the other group with the neutral condition where the semantic category was the same (the word does not depicts the picture)(Rosinski et al., 1975). Finally another similar study was done by Stephen Lupker(1979) which investigated whether or not semantic interference was effective in a picture-word task. In the experiment, 20 participants from the University of Western Ontario, who were native English speaker, and had never participated in a picture word interference task. In the interference condition, participants were asked to name the picture but not the words label in the picture(Lupker, 1979). For example, a picture of a “dog” will be shown with the label of a “pig”.
However, in the neutral condition, a picture of a “dog” will be shown with the label of a “hat” (Lupker, 1979).The results of the experiment suggested that if the word was in the same semantic category such as a picture of a “dog” with the label “pig” than it would cause more interference compare to the neutral condition(Lupker, 1979). The conclusion to all of these studies is that when humans are subjected to two tasks, one involving an interference condition and a neutral condition, humans will generally do better in the one depicting a neutral condition. My experiment is similar to all the previous experiments as my experiment also investigates whether or not semantic interference will affect an individual’s ability to complete a task in the presence of interference stimuli. Before my experiment began I hypothesized that the participants that were subjected to the interference condition would take significantly longer to respond. Also, I predicted that this experiment would suggest that the semantic interference would have a significant effect on the automatic processing of the human brain. Method Participants 8 undergraduate students from Indiana University Bloomington were recruited for this experiment. The participants’ ages ranged from 18 to 22 years old.
Out of 8 participants, 4 of the participants identified as male while 4 participants identified as female. Matherial For the experiment all the participants were arranged into two different sections that depicted 20 slides using Microsoft Office Powerpoint 2016. For those in the interference condition, the pictures depicted animals than the ones described in the descriptive words underneath. For example, a picture of a “cat” would be display with a written word label of a “mouse”(see figure 3). However, for the neutral condition, the pictures had words that were not an animal. For example, a picture of a “goat” would display a written word label of “door”(see figure 4). The words on animal pictures depicted in the slides were written in standard front of Calibri (Body) with the font size of 28. The picture of the animal in each slide were placed in the center of the screen. Participants response time to complete each condition (interference or neutral) was then recorded by using a stopwatch device on mobile phone. A Google Excel sheet was used to record data. The results of this experiment were analyzed by using a resampling java applet created by Dr. Tom Busey.
