ReviewBehavior research methods2024
The Stroop legacy: A cautionary tale on methodological issues and a proposed spatial solution.
Review in Behavior research methods, 2024. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 15 papers, 1 of them a synthesis that pooled it.
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Who cites it
15 citing papers in PubMed, 1 synthesis or guideline pooled it.
- The puzzle of profitless pre-cues.Psychonomic bulletin & review · 2026Pooled it
- When forewarned is not forearmed: No evidence for cue-based proactive control in the spatial Stroop task.Journal of experimental psychology. Human perception and performance · 2026Article
- Investigating the gaze-driven reversed congruency effect in the spatial Stroop task: A distributional approach.British journal of psychology (London, England : 1953) · 2025Article
- The role of threat sensitivity as a mediator in the relationship between cognitive conflict and risk-taking behavior in young adults.Cognitive research: principles and implications · 2025Article
- No evidence that selection is resource-demanding in conflict and bilingual language production tasks: Implications for theories of adaptive control and language-control associations.Psychonomic bulletin & review · 2025Article
- Article
- Exploring the spatial interference effects elicited by social and non-social targets: A conditional accuracy function approach.British journal of psychology (London, England : 1953) · 2025Article
- Credibility revolution: pursuing a balanced and sustainable approach, without dogmas, without magic elixirs.Frontiers in psychology · 2025Article
- Cognitive functions explain discrete parameters of normal walking and dual-task walking, but not postural sway in quiet stance among physically active older people.BMC geriatrics · 2024Article
- EEG microstate transition cost correlates with task demands.PLoS computational biology · 2024Article
- A spatial version of the Stroop task for examining proactive and reactive control independently from non-conflict processes.Attention, perception & psychophysics · 2024Article
- A comparison between different variants of the spatial Stroop task: The influence of analytic flexibility on Stroop effect estimates and reliability.Behavior research methods · 2024Article
- Frontal P300 asymmetry and congruence judgment: Retroactive switching is impaired during school day mornings in female adolescents.Current research in neurobiology · 2024Article
- Proactive control for conflict resolution is intact in subclinical obsessive-compulsive individuals.Frontiers in psychology · 2024Article
- On the relationship between emotions and cognitive control: Evidence from an observational study on emotional priming Stroop task.PloS one · 2023Observational
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5 authors.
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Abstract
The Stroop task is a seminal paradigm in experimental psychology, so much that various variants of the classical color-word version have been proposed. Here we offer a methodological review of them to emphasize the importance of designing methodologically rigorous Stroop tasks. This is not an end by itself, but it is fundamental to achieve adequate measurement validity, which is currently hindered by methodological heterogeneity and limitations. Among the several Stroop task variants in the literature, our methodological overview shows that the spatial Stroop task is not only a potentially methodologically adequate variant, which can thus assure measuring the Stroop effect with the required validity, but it might even allow researchers to overcome some of the methodological limitations of the classical paradigm due to its use of verbal stimuli. We thus focused on the spatial Stroop tasks in the literature to verify whether they really exploit such inherent potentiality. However, we show that this was generally not the case because only a few of them (1) are purely spatial, (2) ensure both all the three types of conflicts/facilitations (at the stimulus, response, and task levels) and the dimensional overlaps considered fundamental for yielding a complete Stroop effect according to the multiple loci account and Kornblum's theory, respectively, and (3) controlled for low-level binding and priming effects that could bias the estimated Stroop effect. Based on these methodological considerations, we present some examples of spatial Stroop tasks that, in our view, satisfy such requirements and, thus, ensure producing complete Stroop effects.
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