JOURNAL OF THE EXPERIMENTAL ANALYSIS OF BEHAVIOR 2016, 105, 3–13 NUMBER 1 (JANUARY)

THE STROOP EFFECT AT 80: THE COMPETITION BETWEEN STIMULUS

CONTROL AND COGNITIVE CONTROL
DAVID A. WASHBURN
GEORGIA STATE UNIVERSITY

For more than 80 years, researchers have examined the interference between automatic processing of
stimuli, such as the meaning of color words, on performance of a controlled-processing task such as
naming the color in which words are printed. The Stroop effect and its many variations provide an ideal
test platform for examining the competition between stimulus control and cognitive control of atten-
tion, as reflected in behavior. The two experiments reported here show that rhesus monkeys, like
human adults, show interference from incongruous stimulus conditions in a number-Stroop task, and
that the monkeys may be particularly susceptible to influence from response strength and less able, rela-
tive to human adults, of using executive attention to minimize this interference.
Key words: comparative cognition, stimulus control, cognitive control, Stroop effect, automatic and
controlled processing

Eight decades ago, the Journal of Experimental
Psychology published dissertation research by
John Ridley Stroop on interference effects on
verbal responses. Stroop (1935) examined a
question that was originally explored by Cattell
(1886): What causes differences in the time
required to name various stimuli? Although
relatively few have read his article, Stroop’s
results are among the most familiar and fre-
quently cited in the history of psychology. The
time to read a list of color words was not signif-
icantly affected if the words were printed in
incongruous colors (e.g., RED printed in blue,
BROWN printed in red, and so forth, where
the correct response would be “red,
brown…”); however, the time to name the
color of a stimulus was reliably slower if the
stimulus was an incongruous color word than
if the stimulus was a block of color or arbitrary
symbol (in the example above, the correct
response would be “blue, red, …”). Practice in
This research was supported by NICHD grants 060563
and 38051, and by Georgia State University. The author
thanks the graduate and undergraduate assistants who
helped with the collection of the data, and all the indivi-
duals who are dedicated to care for the nonhuman pri-
mates at the Language Research Center. Animals were
treated in accordance with the legal and ethical guidelines
of the United States, the American Psychological Associa-
tion, and Georgia State University. For additional informa-
tion, contact the author at dwashburn@gsu.edu.
Address correspondence to David Washburn, Depart-
ment of Psychology, Box 5010, Atlanta, GA 30302–5010
(email: dwashburn@gsu.edu).
doi: 10.1002/jeab.194
naming colors of incongruous color-words
reduced but did not eliminate the interfer-
ence from the incongruous color stimuli.
Taken together, these findings suggested to
Stroop that “the associations that have been
formed between the word stimuli and the
reading response are evidently more effective
than those that have been formed between
the color stimuli and the naming response”
(Stroop, 1935, pg. 659–660).
There’s nothing in Stroop (1935) to suggest
that the author or the journal editor antici-
pated that this solid series of experiments
would become one of the most highly cited
publications in the history of psychology, or
would make Stroop’s name synonymous with
interference effects from incongruous stimuli,
even beyond the verbal reactions and color sti-
muli that characterized the original report.
Eighty years after the landmark publication,
PsycINFO lists almost 5,000 published citations
of the Stroop (1935) manuscript, plus hun-
dreds of other publications that reference the
Stroop task or effect or the many Stroop-like
variations on the basic interference paradigm.
(Although it can be debated whether all of
these incongruity-interference variations are
really the same as Stroop’s color-naming task,
for purposes of the present paper, these vari-
ous Stroop-like tasks/effects will simply be
called “Stroop tasks/effects.”) Professor Stroop
himself published only three other psychology
papers before dedicating his life and career to
biblical studies, and died in 1973 when his

3
4 DAVID A. WASHBURN
signature article had “only” been cited about
170 times—or in fewer publications than cita-
tions since January 2015 alone!
In two important reviews of the literature,
MacLeod (1991, 1992) discussed some reasons
why the Stroop task became so popular.
MacLeod (1992) highlighted the fact that the
Stroop effect is robust and easy to replicate,
and also that, despite the many studies across
the years, the effect had yet to be fully expli-
cated. It also seems likely that interest in the
Stroop phenomenon is encouraged by the
counterintuitive nature of the effect, in that
people first learn to name colors, and learning
to read color words is dependent upon but
also interferes with color naming. Additionally,
Stroop effects highlight a robust cognitive fail-
ure, because it seems unreasonable that one
cannot by effort or strategy avoid interference
from simple irrelevant, incongruous stimulus
features.
MacLeod (1992) also noted that the Stroop
task is popular because it allows researchers to
study the competition between automatic and
controlled processing (Bugg & Crump, 2012;
Lindsay & Jacoby, 1994; Posner & Snyder,
1975; Shiffrin & Schneider, 1977). Automatic-
ity is characterized by fast, stereotyped, inflexi-
ble, effortless (or low-effort) responding
under highly practiced circumstances. For
experienced readers, the task of perceiving
the meaning of familiar words is automatic.
Effective responding under conditions that are
unfamiliar, or in which automatic responding
might lead to errors, requires effortful atten-
tion or controlled processing. Most times,
automatic and controlled responding work
quite harmoniously together. Even complex
but highly practiced behaviors (e.g., driving a
car, which involves many automatic responses)
can be coordinated concurrently with
attention-demanding activities (e.g., carrying
on a conversation, which periodically requires
controlled processing). However, other task
combinations and conditions pit automatic
and controlled responding against one
another, typically such that automatic respond-
ing is relatively maladaptive—as in the Stroop
task, in which the automatic tendency to
respond according to what the word says con-
flicts with task instructions to respond accord-
ing to what color the word is.
The tension between controlled and auto-
matic processing is certainly not unique to the
Stroop paradigm. Many theorists and research-
ers have contrasted top-down versus bottom-
up, goal-directed versus data-driven,
supervisor- or executive-controlled versus
contention-scheduled, endogenous versus
exogenous, or similar descriptions to charac-
terize what might most broadly be called “cog-
nitive control versus stimulus control of
behavior” (although, as will be discussed
below, this is not the ideal way to distinguish
these sources of influence over behavior).
That is, tasks like Stroop provide a fertile basis
for examining performance under conditions
in which the participants’ intentions (dictated
by instructions or in response to changing task
demands) require resisting strong stimulus–
response associations that are either naturally
prepotent (e.g., because of movement, sud-
denness, intensity, or novelty) or have been
made strong by previous experience (Logan,
1980). Indeed, this conflict between response
tendencies was acknowledged by Stroop
(1935) in his original explanation for his
results. Whereas each color-word stimulus, like
most other words, has a single, highly associ-
ated response (e.g., the stimulus “BROWN” is
strongly associated with the response to read
the word), the colors themselves as associated
with many potential responses (e.g., a patch of
the color brown might be called “brown” but
might also be called leather or chocolate or
wood or poop, and so forth). Color-word
meanings generally interfere with color nam-
ing, and not the other way around, because
word stimuli have strongly associated responses
that are incorrect on incongruous trials, where
the task instructions require participants to
respond to the less-dominant stimulus cue.
It is this conflict between stimulus control
and cognitive or executive control that moti-
vated the few Stroop studies conducted with
nonhuman animals. For example, Beran,
Washburn and Rumbaugh (2007) tested a
language-trained chimpanzee with color-
naming tasks like the one used in the original
Stroop (1935) study. This ape named Lana
has a rich history of using geographic symbols
(“lexigrams”) to communicate about various
items, places, and people (see Rumbaugh,
1977; Beran & Heimbauer, 2015). Included
among the lexigrams that Lana had learned
were symbols to represent several colors.
Beran and collaborators (2007) showed that
Lana could sort stimuli according to color, but
 COMPETITION FOR CONTROL
made significantly more errors when the to-be-
sorted stimulus was a color-word lexigram in
an incongruous color (e.g., the lexigram for
YELLOW, but colored blue).
Washburn (1994) contrasted two potential
mechanisms for the conflict between auto-
matic and controlled processing, in a study in
which rhesus macaques (Macaca mulatta)
responded on a numerical variation of the
Stroop paradigm. These monkeys had learned
in prior research (Washburn & Rumbaugh,
1991) to select the larger of two or more Ara-
bic numerals, presented on a computer
screen. For example, a monkey might see a
5 and 4 presented in random positions on the
screen. If the animal selected the 5, then five
fruit-flavored food pellets were automatically
delivered, whereas the animal would receive
four pellets if the 4 was touched. In this way,
the animals came to select the larger numeral
at levels significantly better than chance, even
for first-trial responses to novel pairings of
numerals.
These same animals easily learned to indi-
cate which side of the screen contained the
larger array of randomly presented items (e.g.,
four As versus five Cs). Irrespective of the
identity of the items that made up the arrays,
the animals were better than chance at indi-
cating which array had the greater number of
items. Baseline trials such as these, with letters
as stimuli, were interspersed with two types of
trial in which the arrays consisted of Arabic
numerals: congruous trials were those in
which the larger array was also made up of the
larger-value numeral (e.g., three 5 s versus two
1 s), whereas these cues were in conflict for
incongruous trials (e.g., three 5 s versus two
6 s, where the correct response in both exam-
ples was to select the three 5 s). Rhesus mon-
keys and human participants produced clear
and reliable Stroop effects, with slower
responding on incongruous trials than on
baseline trials. For the macaques, incongruous
trials also produced significantly more errors
than were observed on baseline trials. Wash-
burn (1994) further tested rival predictions by
the strength-of-association explanation com-
pared to a speed-of-processing accounts, con-
cluding that it is the “highly probable” rather
than the “fast” attribute of automaticity that
creates Stroop-like interference. Because
number-Stroop effects increased as the sym-
bolic distance of the irrelevant stimulus
5
meanings increased (e.g., bigger effects for
3 ones versus 2 fours than for 3 threes versus
2 fours), but not as the difference in array
sizes increased (e.g., effect for 3 ones versus
2 fours comparable to effect for 6 ones versus
2 fours), it was concluded that Stroop effects
are a function of the degree of stimulus con-
trol, or the animals’ history of being rewarded
for selecting a particular stimulus in a particu-
lar context.
Working with a different species of
macaque, Lauwereyns and collaborators
(2000) showed that Stroop effects can be
reciprocal if the competing stimulus cues have
similar response strengths. Using a task in
which multiple, equipotent cues (color, shape,
motion, location) might influence responding,
these researchers reported interference
(slower responses) on incongruous trials and
super-additive effects on trials with multiple
incongruous cues (e.g., when color was the to-
be-attended cue but shape and location were
associated with a competing response), irre-
spective of which dimension was the to-be-
selected cue. As with the number-Stroop task
described above, these findings suggest that
nonhuman animals, like humans, show perfor-
mance deficits when automaticity and con-
trolled attention are brought into conflict.
Although Stroop-task performance by non-
human animals may reflect the same
controlled-versus-automatic conflict as is seen
when humans perform the task, this does not
mean that monkeys are equally adept at con-
trolled processing. As Posner and Fan (2008)
observed, whereas there were similar patterns
of Stroop-like interference on incongruous
trials for undergraduate students and for rhe-
sus monkeys in the Washburn (1994) study,
the magnitude of the interference (and facili-
tation from congruous trials) was substantially
greater for the nonhuman primates. Moreo-
ver, the effects of strength-of-association
reported in that study were stronger for the
nonhuman than the human primates. Thus,
monkeys’ responses appeared to be more
influenced by the stimulus control than were
the responses by human participants—or, said
the other way, human participants showed
greater capacity for controlled processing than
did the macaques. Of course, it is difficult to
interpret performance differences between
groups, especially species, even when the
groups are tested on identical tasks and with
6 DAVID A. WASHBURN
comparable apparatus. Many variables can
impact the absolute speed and accuracy of
performance; but it is highly suggestive that
the within-subject manipulations also showed
larger effects of stimulus-control for monkeys
than for humans.
One method for teasing apart the contribu-
tions of controlled versus automatic processing
in the Stroop task has been to manipulate the
ratio of congruous-to-incongruous trials
(Logan & Sbrodoff, 1979; Shor, 1975; see
review by Bugg & Crump, 2012). Kane and
Engle (2003) used such proportion-congruent
manipulations in a study with human partici-
pants. As is common in many studies by Engle
and his collaborators (e.g., Redick & Engle,
2011; Unsworth & Engle, 2007), two groups of
participants were formed on the basis of per-
formance on a complex memory span test,
known primarily to reflect individual differ-
ences in controlled or executive attention
(Engle, 2002). Thus, high-span individuals are
better than low-span individuals at maintaining
and manipulating information in the focus of
attention. Kane and Engle compared these
two groups with respect to performance on
the Stroop task, and manipulated the ratio of
congruous-to-incongruous trials in ways that
would systematically alter the stimulus-control
strength of association between color-word
reading and responses. As has been shown in
many studies, Stroop interference on incon-
gruous trials was greater when those trials con-
stituted the vast minority of trials; however,
what was particularly interesting about the
Kane and Engle results was the interaction
with the working-memory capacity (controlled
attention) grouping variable. On tests in which
most of the trials were congruous, and thus
the habit strength of reading the color words
was reinforced on the majority of trials, low-
span participants made significantly more
errors on incongruous probe trials than did
high-span participants. That is, participants
with relatively poor attention-control skills
were particularly more likely than their high-
span counterparts to show Stroop interference
when contextual conditions reinforced
responding to the irrelevant color-word cue.
No differences in accuracy were observed
between the groups when every trial was
incongruous, because in this condition, every
trial serves to build associative strength for the
“name the color” response and to reinforce
goal maintenance of the Stroop instructions.
On the basis of these and related results, Kane
and Engle concluded that goal maintenance
and competition resolution are both critical
mechanisms for determining patterns of
Stroop interference.
The finding that the effects of proportion-
congruent manipulations are greater for indi-
viduals with poor executive-attention skills
than those with relatively high capacity for
controlled attention (see Hutchison, 2011 for
replication of this result) served as the inspira-
tion for the present study. One goal for the
present experiment was to replicate the Stroop
effects of Washburn (1994) and to test the
effect proportion-congruous manipulations,
which have been shown in many Stroop-like
tests of human participants, but not with
Stroop performance by nonhuman animals.
But moreover, the previous results suggest that
manipulating congruent-to-incongruent trial
ratios may be helpful in determining whether
groups differ in the capacity for controlled
attention. Given the species differences in the
magnitude of Stroop interference discussed
above, I predicted results for the monkey par-
ticipants in the present study would resemble
the pattern Kane and Engle showed for low-
span human participants: macaques, like low-
span human participants, were expected to
show differential effects of Stroop interference
as a function of the ratio of incongruous-to-
congruous trials. Specifically, it was anticipated
that conditions that favored automatic,
stimulus-controlled responding (more congru-
ous than incongruous) would result in more
errors for monkeys on those infrequent incon-
gruous trials than would conditions that eroded
this associative-strength basis for responding
(more incongruous than congruous), and that
these differences for the nonhuman primates
would be larger than the differences that had
been reported for humans.
Experiment 1
Method
Participants. Three rhesus monkeys
were tested in this study. These animals had
previously learned to manipulate a computer
joystick so as to control the movements of
a cursor and to respond to stimuli presented
on a computer screen (see Rumbaugh,
Richardson, Washburn, Savage-Rumbaugh, &
 COMPETITION FOR CONTROL
Hopkins,1989 for training details). The ani-
mals had been trained and tested on numer-
ous tasks and for numerous studies, and had
learned to select the greater of two Arabic
numerals, following the procedure of Wash-
burn (1991), discussed above. The animals
had also been previously trained on the
number-Stroop task used in the present study,
although the specific conditions administered
here were new to the monkeys. The monkeys
were not food- or fluid-deprived or otherwise
reduced in body weight for purposes of test-
ing. Rather, the animals had continuous access
to the test apparatus from their home cages,
and could work or rest as they chose through-
out the day, including during the portion of
each test day in which the task for this study
was available.
Apparatus and Task. Each monkey was
tested with an individual computerized test sys-
tem. The monkey responded to computer-
graphic stimuli by manipulating a joystick,
which in turn controlled the movements of a
cursor on the screen. Correct responses were
automatically rewarded with fruit-flavored
chow pellets, and auditory feedback (tone or
buzz) followed each response.
The task was the same number-Stroop task
used by Washburn (1994), in which partici-
pants are required to select which of two
arrays of stimuli contains the most members.
Each trial began when the participant brought
the cursor into contact with a small circle, pre-
sented in the middle of the screen. Immedi-
ately after this trial-initiation response, a
random number of stimuli was displayed on
the left and right sides of the screen. Each
array contained 1 to 7 items, and the two
arrays always differed both with respect to
array size and the stimulus that made up each
array. For baseline trials, both arrays consisted
of letter stimuli. For congruous and incongru-
ous trials, arrays of Arabic numerals were
presented.
Procedure. Each monkey was tested on
20 blocks of the numerical-Stroop task, with
each block consisting of at least 500 consecu-
tive trials. Each block began with baseline
trials, until the monkey responded correctly to
the larger array on 8 consecutive trials. Subse-
quently, the probability of a baseline trial was
0.20. Probability of the other trial types varied
by block. On some blocks (randomly deter-
mined) the probability of an incongruous trial
7
was also 0.20, and the remaining trials were of
the congruous type. This was the “congruous >
incongruous” (C > I) condition. For the I > C
condition, there were no congruous trials
(as was done by Kane and Engle, 2003), such
that 80% of the trials on average were incon-
gruous and the remainder were of the base-
line type. Each monkey completed 10 blocks
each in the C > I and I > C conditions, but the
order was randomized across participants. Two
blocks from different conditions were never
administered in the same day. For purposes of
these analyses, only the last 300 trials of each
block were examined for accuracy and
response-time measures. This allowed some
trials per block for the animals to experience
the ratio of trial types, leaving ample trials for
determining whether Stroop condition and
ratio affected performance.
Results and Discussion
Means were computed by animal, block,
condition, trial-type (baseline, congruous,
incongruous), and variable (accuracy and
response time on correct trials). The differ-
ence between baseline and incongruous trials
was also calculated for each animal, block, and
condition as a derived measure of Stroop
interference. The results from Experiment
1 are graphed in Figure 1. For comparison
purposes alone, the figure also shows the C = I
performance from the (different) monkeys in
the Washburn (1994) study. The current data
replicate the pattern of results from Washburn
(1994), in that monkeys were able to select
the larger of two arrays across conditions, but
the speed [F(1,2) = 35.1, p = .03] and accuracy
[F(1,2) = 31.7, p = .03] of these selections
were significantly impaired when the larger of
the two arrays contained the smaller of
the two Arabic numerals. Note that the magni-
tude of Stroop interference (i.e., the differ-
ence between incongruous and baseline
performance) was significantly larger for
the C > I condition than for the I > C
condition—both for the accuracy measure
[F(1,2) = 35.8, p = .03], as was predicted, and
also for the response time measure
[F(1,2) = 62.6, p = .02].
As Kane and Engle (2003) found, the trial-
ratio condition where most trials are congru-
ous, and thus that reinforce the prepotent
association between symbolic values and
8 DAVID A. WASHBURN
Fig. 1. Experiment 1 results for accuracy (top) and
response-time measures. Interference, or the difference
between performance in the incongruous and baseline
trials, varies significantly as a function of the relative prob-
ability of congruous and incongruous trials. (The C = I
condition are the means from Washburn, 1994).
response habits, produced the most errors on
incongruous probes in the present study. In
other words, performance on incongruous
trials was most affected when incongruous
trials depended on controlled attention the
most (C > I), compared to I > C trials in
which the monkeys were reminded on most
trials to ignore stimulus meanings. Although
any comparison with the C = I condition of
the Washburn (1994) study can only be made
tentatively, it appears that the monkeys in the
present study experienced both a reinforce-
ment of the strength of association between
numerals and responses in the C > I condi-
tion, and also a slight erosion of automaticity
(or, more likely, an increase of control by the
array-numerousness stimulus cue) in the con-
dition in which there were no congruous
trials. The increase in automaticity for the con-
trol of response by numeral values in the C > I
condition is also suggested by the absolute
decrease in response time in the baseline con-
dition (C > I compared to I > C), albeit this
difference was not statistically reliable.
Kane and Engle (2003) did not find a
response-time difference between high- and
low-span participants in the C > I condition,
although Hutchison (2011) did, and both stud-
ies reported the largest Stroop interference
effects were obtained in the condition in which
the majority of trials were congruous. Similarly,
for the monkeys in the present data, the largest
Stroop effects were seen in the C > I condition.
Thus, this finding is consistent with, if not
directly predicted by, previous results.
As was reported by Washburn (1994), the
absolute magnitudes of the interference
effects for monkeys were again larger than
those typically reported, albeit with markedly
different tasks, for humans. This provides
more indirect support for the suggestion that
monkeys may be particularly sensitive to auto-
matic processing from stimulus control; how-
ever, it leaves open the question of whether
monkeys can—as humans (particularly those
high-span participants who score well on
executive-attention measures) can—marshal
controlled processing if sufficiently motivated
to reduce the effects of strong associative cues.
The second experiment was designed to pro-
vide a direct comparison between humans
and rhesus monkeys on the capacity to use
voluntary attention to ameliorate the effects
of proportion-congruent manipulations on
Stroop interference.
Experiment 2
Method
The same monkeys from Experiment 1 were
again tested in the C > I condition of the
number-Stroop task. Additionally, 48 under-
graduate volunteers were tested on this same
task, and in the C > I condition. Human parti-
cipants received points rather than pellets for
correct responses, and lost points (and
received the same buzzing noise and timeout
as the monkeys) for errors. The point-
scoreboard appeared across the top of the
screen during the initiation portion of each
trial. Half of the participants were tested in
the low-incentive condition in which correct
responses earned one point and errors cost
one point. The other half of the participants
(randomly selected) were assigned to the
high-incentive condition in which bonus
points were provided for fast, accurate
responses on incongruous trials, and
 COMPETITION FOR CONTROL 9

additional penalties were added if responses monkeys (low-incentive condition) from

in these trials were either incorrect or too Experiment 1. This presentation allows one to
slow. (The consequences of responses on base- see the overall effect of the incentive manipu-
line and congruous were identical to the low- lation, increasing accuracy and decreasing
motivation condition.) Additionally, partici- response time; additionally, the figure shows
pants in the high-incentive condition were whether the incentive manipulation served to
instructed that they might have to repeat any reduce the magnitude of Stroop interference
trials that produced incorrect or slow (the red portions of each bar). This latter
responses. The threshold for “too slow” was interaction (or lack thereof ) is also high-
150% of the running mean of the correct lighted by the lines drawn between adjacent
responses on previous trials. In this way, the bars, so as to illustrate the change in interfer-
high-incentive condition was designed to moti- ence across conditions.
vate participants, who were instructed in all The accuracy data are generally uninforma-
conditions to “respond as quickly and as accu- tive on these issues. Both the human partici-
rately as possible”, to focus on controlled pro- pants and the rhesus monkeys showed
cessing that would produce rapid, correct significant differences between the baseline
selections of the larger of the arrays, particu- and incongruous conditions [F(1, 18) = 6.04,
larly on incongruous trials. That is, the reward p = .02; F(1,2) = 33.6, p = .03, respectively].
contingencies were designed to encourage However, neither main effect of incentive was
high-incentive participants to try as hard as statistically significant; neither was there a sig-
possible to ignore digit-symbol meanings and nificant interaction. For human participants,
to select larger arrays, even when few trials accuracy was generally near ceiling across con-
were incongruous. ditions. Responses in the high-incentive condi-
In this experiment, the rhesus monkeys tion were slightly but not reliably more
were tested in a high-incentive condition in
which two bonus pellets were delivered for
fast, accurate responses on incongruous trials.
Additional buzzing and timeout was used
when incongruous responses were erroneous
or too slow. (That is, relatively slow but accu-
rate incongruous responses were rewarded
with a single pellet and a 30-s timeout period.)
In this way, the monkeys were also rewarded
for increasing the speed and accuracy of
larger-array selections, particularly on incon-
gruous trials.
Each human completed one block of
200 trials. Each monkey completed 10 blocks
of 500 trials. In each case, only the responses
from the last half of each block were used in
these analyses. This gave the humans and mon-
keys sufficient opportunity to experience the
trial-ratio and reward conditions in each block,
while providing enough trials to analyze the
effects of the manipulations on performance,
without overtraining the congruous trials to
the degree that the array-size cue became more
strongly associated with response than the
symbol-meaning association. Fig. 2. The results of Experiment 2, graphed so as to
illustrate both the effect of an incentive manipulation
(lo versus hi) on accuracy (depicted as error rate, top
Results and Discussion graph) and response latency (bottom graph), and also to
show whether incentive reduced the magnitude of Stroop
Figure 2 displays the results from this interference (red portion of each bar). The low-incentive
experiment, together with the C > I results for monkey data are from Experiment 1.
10 DAVID A. WASHBURN
accurate than those made by participants in
the low-incentive condition (p = .07). Figure 2
shows that this baseline improvement was
accompanied by a slight attenuation, albeit
again not significant (p > .10), in Stroop inter-
ference (from 7% to 4%). Similarly for the
monkeys, the small but nonsignificant
improvement in accuracy in the baseline con-
dition from 88% to 91% was not accompanied
by an improvement in the incongruous condi-
tion. Consequently, Stroop interference (base-
line minus incongruous accuracy) actually
increased slightly but unreliably (p > .10) for
the monkeys in the high-incentive condition.
A similar overall pattern is evident in
the response time data. For humans and for
monkeys, baseline responses were significantly
faster than responses on incongruous trials
[F(1, 18) = 19.2, p < .001; F(1,2) = 52.7,
p = .02, respectively]. That is, both species
showed significant Stroop interference. The
main effect for incentive did not reach signifi-
cance for human participants (p = .08), but
the interaction with trial type was significant
[F(1, 18) = 4.51, p = .04], reflecting the fact
that Stroop interference (incongruous minus
baseline response time) was about twice as
large for the low-incentive compared to the
high-incentive group However, the manipula-
tion of incentive was ineffective in reducing
interference for rhesus monkeys, as there was
an overall reduction in response times in the
high-incentive condition [F(1,2) = 22.4,
p = .04] but no significant interaction
(p > .10). Given the small sample size, one
might wonder whether this absence of an
interaction reflects poor statistical power; how-
ever, as Figure 2 shows, the magnitude of
Stoop interference was equivalent in the two
incentive conditions. All responses (baseline
and incongruous) got faster when the mon-
keys were in the high-incentive condition.
Of course, it is possible that this particular
manipulation of incentive was simply insuffi-
cient to motivate the monkeys sufficiently to
use controlled processing to inhibit the effects
of automatic, stimulus-driven responding. To
be clear, on the majority of the trials the mon-
keys, like the humans, did inhibit the strongly
associated tendency to select the larger stimu-
lus. However, monkeys and humans were
more likely to be wrong on incongruous trials
than on baseline trials, and both species were
slower on average to make correct responses
in the face of prepotent, conflicting, incongru-
ous cues. Nevertheless, it might be argued that
monkeys are capable of using effortful atten-
tion to minimize Stroop interference, as was
observed in this experiment for human partici-
pants, but that the present incentive manipula-
tion was simply inadequate to produce such
an effect. However, it must be noted that the
incentive manipulation was consequential for
the monkeys. Baseline performance shows that
the nonhuman animals were responsive to the
differential rewarding of fast, accurate
responding on incongruous trials; however,
there improvement was general, rather than
reflected a greater reliance on controlled pro-
cessing versus automatic processing.
It should be acknowledged that for mon-
keys, the incentive manipulation was covaried
with practice, such that improvements in accu-
racy and response speed may have been pro-
duced even in the absence of the additional
rewards/penalties. This seems unlikely, as per-
formance on these tasks was asymptotic prior
to the present study and there was no indica-
tion of progressive change across the trial
blocks in Experiment 1 or Experiment
2. Rather, it appears that the monkeys simply
responded more quickly in the high-incentive
blocks, but that this increased efficiency did
not insulate the monkeys against the powerful
influence of the Arabic numerals and their
response associations, reinforced by the pre-
ponderance of congruous relative to incongru-
ous trials.
Although human participants were generally
able to reduce the magnitude of Stroop
effects, the interference did not disappear
entirely. Again, one might wonder whether dif-
ferent incentive manipulations would be even
more effective in eliminating Stroop interfer-
ence, but this would be contrary to the find-
ings by Stroop (1935) and many other
researchers who have shown that Stroop
effects can be reduced but seldom if ever
eliminated completely.
General Discussion
In the Stroop task, response competition is
established between two stimuli (or stimulus
dimensions) with different response-associative
strengths. The stimulus with the stronger
strength of association—for example, reading
the meaning of color words (Stroop, 1935) or
 COMPETITION FOR CONTROL
processing the relative values of Arabic numer-
als (Washburn, 1994)—is made irrelevant for
accurate responding, and indeed interferes
with rapid and accurate responding when par-
ticipants are required to inhibit these strong
response tendencies in favor of less potent,
incongruous contingencies. In the present
experiments and in previous studies, human
and nonhuman primates have shown the abil-
ity to do this. The primates used controlled
processing to resist the habitual response asso-
ciations established through prior experience,
responding instead according to the rules of
the Stroop task; however, these competing
and automatic stimulus cues could not be
ignored without cost. Response interference
manifested itself in an increase in errors and
in response latency, and the present data repli-
cate the finding of Washburn (1994) that this
interference may be greater for rhesus mon-
keys than for human adults, particularly under
conditions that magnify the demands on con-
trolled attention processing. That is, when the
need for controlled processing on incongru-
ous trials is the greatest, because those incon-
gruous trials are infrequent with a context that
reinforces the stimulus–response associative
cues, the rhesus monkeys were particularly vul-
nerable to influence from stimulus control. If
the effect of congruous-to-incongruous ratio
reflects individual differences in the capacity
for controlled attention, as Kane and Engle
(2003) and Hutchison (2011) found for
humans with low versus high working-memory
capacity, then the present data suggest that
rhesus monkeys have a reduced capacity for
controlled attention compared to humans.
This conclusion was further supported by the
results of Experiment 2, in which incentivized
humans but not monkeys could use effortful
cognitive control to reduce the degree of
interference from automatically processed
stimuli.
In the 60 or so years since the so-called cog-
nitive revolution, the notion of stimulus con-
trol has taken a beating within some corners
of the discipline. The description of behavior
as determined by contingencies associated
with experienced stimuli finds little voice in
cognitive perspectives, which focus instead on
the causal and explanatory role of the proces-
sing that intervenes between stimulus and
response. Today, arguably more than at any
time in history, the constructs of attention,
11
executive functioning, and cognitive control
seem to be pervasive and preeminent in
research and theory. Even within the cognitive
framework, however, there has long been an
understanding that behavior is multiply deter-
mined, and that many responses are relatively
automatic, unattended, contention-scheduled,
and habitual. Indeed, the cognitive flexibility,
response inhibition, and self-regulation that
appear to be hallmarks of cognitive control
are noteworthy only in contrast to responses
that are relatively rigid, associative, and invol-
untary. Comparative cognition, with one foot
firmly entrenched in the animal learning tra-
dition while the other rests comfortably in cog-
nitive science, should be most comfortable
with this distinction, as we continue to pursue
a unified understanding of behavior that
includes all that has been learned from studies
of conditioning and all that seems difficult to
explain in instrumental or Pavlovian terms.
That is, comparative cognition seems ideally
positioned to help lead psychology to an
understanding of the moment-by-moment
competition that exists for behavior between
stimulus control and cognitive control (or, if
you prefer, control by stimuli that are concep-
tual and conative).
Humans and other animals are pattern
recognizers. From before birth, they organize
sensory experience so as to make sense of the
world—to distinguish self from others, figure
from ground, signal from noise, predictability
from randomness. The fundamental unit of
learning is not operant or respondent, it is the
percept, and the mechanisms that support
perceptual learning are also those that allow
an organism to understand the contingent
relations that characterize classical condition-
ing, or to see the context + the response + the
reward as parts of a pattern that, once per-
ceived, can make behavior more efficient or
effective (Rumbaugh & Washburn, 2003).
Among the obstacles to perceptual learning
are the variations in salience that characterize
different elements of the sensory field. Sali-
ence facilitates learning, but not necessarily
learning of the right patterns. Relational learn-
ing may be difficult—or indeed may not hap-
pen at all—if irrelevant (or confounding) cues
are both highly salient and readily associated
with responses. Such associations can gain
response strength, to the benefit of subse-
quent production of the same behavior but to
12 DAVID A. WASHBURN
the detriment of behavioral flexibility or gen-
eralization. The Stroop effect is one popular
manifestation of such a detriment.
The notion that incongruous Stroop trials
represent competition between automatic
stimulus control and voluntary or effortful cog-
nitive control has broad acceptance. However,
voluntary or effortful control does not necessi-
tate conscious or strategic shifts in attention
resources. Bugg and Crump (2012) defended
a model of top-down control in which changes
in attention allocation can be triggered by
stimulus context. These stimulus-attention set-
tings are relational and distinct from the
bottom-up, stimulus–response associations that
are thought to produce Stroop interference
(e.g., response habit-strengths associated with
particular color words or Arabic-numeral com-
parisons). In the same way that additional
attention resources may be elicited reflexively
in response to increases in task difficulty
(Kahneman, 1973)—with or without conscious
intervention by an executive or supervisory-
attention system—it may be that proportion-
congruent manipulations like the ones used in
the present study serve to show that the auto-
matic versus controlled processing distinction
is too simplistic, just as Bugg and Crump
claimed. Even in this case, it seems clear from
the present findings that rhesus monkeys are
less capable, compared to human participants,
of learning attention-control relations that can
be used to bias that competition in favor of
controlled processing.
In my own research on the competition
between stimulus control and executive con-
trol, I have tended to distinguish between two
sources of stimulus control. Experiential con-
straints, such as those we have been discussing
in the Stroop task, are the habits and other
conditioned responses that may be elicited
automatically by stimuli. These appear to be
distinct from environmental constraints that
work by habituation/dishabituation, novelty,
movement, suddenness, or changes in inten-
sity to capture attention reflexively. Environ-
mental constraints that elicit shifts of attention
seem more purely stimulus-driven and bottom-
up (although even novelty requires compari-
son to the recent past) than stimulus–response
associations that constitute conditioned
responses and other experiential constraints.
The symbol meanings that cause Stroop effects
depend on strength of association and reflect
stimulus control, but are typically conceived as
top-down or conceptual constraints on behav-
ior. It is possible to put environmental cues in
competition with experiential cues, in the
same way that the Stroop task pits experiential
cues against controlled processing. Whether
experiential constraints and environmental
constraints are ultimately two different sources
of potential control over attention and behav-
ior or just two versions of the same “stimulus
control,” they do appear to vie against the
kind of attention that has been characterized
as controlled, supervisory, executive, and
effortful. For alliteration I have called this
third source of potential control over atten-
tion, and thus behavior, “executive con-
straints” (Washburn & Taglialatela, 2012). In
the earlier sections of this paper, I have used
executive control, voluntary control, and cog-
nitive control interchangeably—but more
accurately, stimulus-driven automatic proces-
sing (environmental and experiential con-
straints) and goal directed, effortful
processing (executive constraints) are all
forms of cognitive control. The focus of atten-
tion, and thus the behavior of an organism, is
determined by the stimuli available to be pro-
cessed, the experience with those stimuli, and
the conceptual stimulation from the proces-
sing of those stimuli.
As was discussed above, species similarities
and differences in cognitive processes require
converging evidence from multiple paradigms
and conditions. Taking inspiration from a pro-
ductive vein of individual-differences research
that has served to elucidate many of the rela-
tions between controlled attention and other
cognitive processes (e.g., Kane and Engle,
2003), the present study contributes additional
evidence in support of the following conclu-
sions: (a) the behavior of rhesus monkeys, like
humans, is determined by the competition
between cognitive control and stimulus con-
trol; (b) monkeys, like humans, can use con-
trolled processing even in the face of strong
cues for automatic responding; (c) the compe-
tition for attention does manifest in increased
errors and slower responses, particularly for
nonhuman primates; and (d) relative to
human adults, rhesus monkeys seem less capa-
ble of reducing these costs by force of will or
motivated effort. Future research should
inform the veracity and limits of these state-
ments, and also determine the degree to
 COMPETITION FOR CONTROL
which these apparent species differences may
be ameliorated by training that improves the
capacity for cognitive control.
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Received: November 27, 2015
Final Acceptance: December 9, 2015