Abstract
In this study, we examined interference inhibition by the preceding attention switching block using the Simon and the Stroop tasks.The three attention switching conditions constituted of two control conditions in which the participants had to read a digit either exclusively in English or in Japanese and of a switching condition in which they had to read it randomly in one of these languages, being cued at the start of each trial. Each set of the experimental blocks was composed of a switching condition block followed by an interference task (either Simon or Stroop) block. The entire set was repeated several times. The participants were pre-selected according to their subjective well-being (20 each for the high and the low happiness groups) with a questionnaire that included an item for assessing the subjective well-being. It was found that the two interference tasks were affected differently by the switching conditions with the Simon task interference being larger for the English reading condition compared with the other two conditions and the subjective happiness having no effect. In contrast, with the Stroop task interference was reduced when the participants performed the task following the English and the Switching blocks. The findings suggest that different underlying processes are involved in these two interference tasks.
