Abstract
This study examined the locus of Stroop-like interference and facilitation effects on the processing of line-drawn picture categorizing, using a unique version of Stroop-like picture-picture categorizing task, which both target and distracting stimuli were pictures, from which semantic information can be processed without lexical processing. In this task, to clarify the effect of lexical, phonological processing on reaction, participants were divided into two groups of reaction type, key press and verbal reaction group, and were required to respond category of the target pictures (animal or fruit) ignoring the distracting pictures. To clarify the effect of semantic relations on the amount of interference, the following conditions were presented under the combination of target and distracting pictures: same stimulus (SS), same category (SC), different category (DC), neutral (N), and control (C). To investigate the time course of processing, stimulus onset asynchrony (SOA) between target and distractor was varied. In the results, Stroop-like interference effect was seen both types of reaction groups, but facilitation effect was significantly only on verbal reaction group, whereas not on key press group. These results indicate that the cause of interference is semantic, lexical, and phonological processing, whereas the cause of facilitation is mainly lexical, phonological processing.
