A study of behavioral related conditioned sound in stroop task

Abstract

This study examined the effect of conditioned sound as stimuli in an audio-visual Stroop task. The conditioned sound is induced under the pairing of a sound stimulus with conditioned behaviors in our daily life. For example the sound of different pedestrian traffic light is conditioned with the meaning of cross the road or stop crossing the road. In this study, a cross model audio-visual Stroop task was used to test the effect of conditioned sound, since it is always presented with other visual cues in daily life. It was hypothesized that, conditioned sound would produce interference effect in the Stroop task. A 2 (audio stimuli: conditioned sound / voiced representation) x 2 (visual stimuli: pictorial representation/ text representation) x 2 (congruence: audio stimuli and visual stimuli are congruent in meaning / audio stimuli and visual stimuli are incongruent in meaning) factorial design was constructed. Sixty Hong Kong permanent residents from the universities in Hong Kong had been invited to join the test. ANOVA tests had been used to explore and analyze the data, showing that both the audio stimuli (conditioned sound and voiced representation) may induce interference effect; whereas conditioned sound created greater interference than voice representation. These results are in congruence with previous literature on the induction of behavioral facilitation and interference under Stroop task. The study shows that conditioned sound resulted from our daily conditioned behavior affect human perception in multi-modal Stroop effect.