The behavioral-related conditioned sound in cross modal stroop task

Abstract

This study examined the effect of conditioned sound as stimuli in an audiovisual Stroop task. It is know that the conditioned sound is induced under the pairing of a sound stimulus with conditioned behaviors in our daily life. For example, the sound of pedestrian traffic light is conditioned with the meaning of crossing the road or not crossing the road. In this study, a cross modal audiovisual Stroop task was used to test the effect of conditioned sound, since it is always presented with other visual cues in our daily life. It was hypothesized that conditioned sound would produce interference effect in the Stroop task. A 2 (audio stimuli: conditioned sound/voiced representation) × 2 (visual stimuli: pictorial representation/text representation) × 2 (congruence: audio stimuli and visual stimuli are congruent in meaning/audio stimuli and visual stimuli are incongruent in meaning) × 2 (tasks: answer corresponding to visual stimuli/answer corresponding to audio stimuli) factorial design was constructed. Sixty Hong Kong college students with permanent Hong Kong resident status participated in this study. ANOVA tests had been employed to explore and analyze the data, aiming to show that both audio stimuli (conditioned sound and voiced representation) might induce interference effect; while voiced representation created greater interference than conditioned sound. The results were in congruence with the previous literature on the induction of behavioral interference under the Stroop task. The study showed that conditioned sound resulted from our daily conditioned behavior affected human perception in the multimodal Stroop effect. The study also supported the attenuation model in selective attention. As conditioned sound may give slower and more inaccurate responses than spoken word, it is suggested that the use of conditioned sound as indicators in different instruments and tools used in our daily life can be replaced by spoken word to enhance their effectiveness by facilitating quicker and more accurate responses.