Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

The Stroop effect is perhaps the most recognized cognitive phenomenon in psychology. People are slowed at naming ink colors, when the ink is used to represent a word denoting a color. Some theories suggest early perceptual conflict, whereas others suggest that later response conflict is the cause of the effect. We examined whether adding a divergent thinking aspect to a Stroop experiment would enhance the effect, as this would occur only at the response selection stage. In a controlled experiment, we found that making a choice at the response stage produced a Stroop effect of identical magnitude to the traditional incongruent condition of the Stroop task. This may suggest that Stroop effects can be produced at the response generation stage. However, correlation and regression analyses hinted that this was linked to the processing limits of semantic control, rather than domain-general cognitive control, which may underlie the traditional Stroop effect.