Single-letter coloring and spatial cuing do not eliminate or reduce a semantic contribution to the Stroop effect

Abstract

The automaticity of semantic activation in the Stroop task is still the subject of considerable debate (Augustinova & Ferrand, 2007; Manwell, Roberts, & Besner, 2004). The present experiments were designed to assess whether coloring and cuing a single letter (vs. all letters) in the Stroop task reliably eliminates semantically based Stroop interference or whether the elimination observed by Manwell et al. was due to insufficient statistical power. Experiment 1 was an exact replication of the experiment conducted by Manwell and colleagues and involved a large population. Experiment 2 replicated and extended Experiment 1 by controlling for initial fixation. In line with previous findings obtained by Augustinova and Ferrand, both experiments indicated that coloring and cuing a single letter failed to eliminate or even reduce the semantically based Stroop effect. Thus, these results add to the growing body of evidence suggesting that semantic activation in the Stroop task is automatic.