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As a vital part of our daily lives, number processing has received much attention in current cognitive research. Most adults perceive with ease the numerical magnitude of a two-digit number and also the individual magnitudes of the component digits, yet the relation between the 2 is poorly understood. Application to two-digit numbers of Garner's speeded classification paradigm (Experiment 1) and of system factorial technology (Experiment 2) jointly reveals phases of independent and of coactive processing within a well-defined time-course. A new model, the interactive race coactive model, explains various facets of two-digit number processing. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2020 APA, all rights reserved).

The emotional Stroop effect (ESE) is the result of longer naming latencies to ink colors of emotion words than to ink colors of neutral words. The difference shows that people are affected by the emotional content conveyed by the carrier words even though they are irrelevant to the color-naming task at hand. The ESE has been widely deployed with patient populations, as well as with non-selected populations, because the emotion words can be selected to match the tested pathology. The ESE is a powerful tool, yet it is vulnerable to various threats to its validity. This report refers to potential sources of confounding and includes a modal experiment that provides the means to control for them. The most prevalent threat to the validity of existing ESE studies is sustained effects and habituation wrought about by repeated exposure to emotion stimuli. Consequently, the order of exposure to emotion and neutral stimuli is of utmost importance. We show that in the standard design, only one specific order produces the ESE.

A picture-word version of the Stroop task was used to test the automatic activation of psychological distance by words carrying various senses of psychological distance: temporal (tomorrow, in a year), social (friend, enemy), and hypotheticality (sure, maybe). The pictures implied depth, with the words appearing relatively close to or distant from the observer. The participants classified the spatial distance of words faster when the word's implicit psychological distance matched its spatial distance (e.g., a geographically close word was classified faster when it was "friend" than when it was "enemy"). The findings are consistent with the idea that psychological distance is accessed automatically, even when it is not directly related to people's current goals, and suggest that psychological distance is an important dimension of meaning, common to spatial distance, temporal distance, social distance, and hypotheticality.

Three influential perspectives of social cognition entail conflicting predictions regarding the selectivity of performance under stress. According to the attention view, selectivity to the task-relevant attribute improves under stress because of reduced utilization of task-irrelevant attributes. According to the capacity-resource approach, stress depletes attentional resources wherefore selectivity fails for all but chronically accessible information. A third perspective, ironic process theory, similarly holds that selective attention fails under stress but adds that task-irrelevant information is rendered hyperaccessible. The theoretical derivations were tested in a series of experiments using 2 classes of selectivity measures, with special care taken to control for hitherto neglected factors of context The results showed that the selectivity of attention improved under stress, consistent with the prediction of the attention view.

Five experiments demonstrate that context has a powerful effect on the ease with which people can name (Experiments 1-3) or categorize (Experiments 4-5) a stimulus while ignoring another stimulus, irrelevant or conflicting with the target. Selectivity of attention to the target dimension was gauged through Stroop and Garner effects. When the stimulus values along the target dimension and the to-be-ignored dimension were correlated over the experimental trials, large effects of Stroop and Garner influenced performance. However, when random allocation of values created zero dimensional correlation, the Stroop effects vanished. These results imply that when the nominally irrelevant dimension is in fact correlated with the relevant dimension, participants then attend to the irrelevant dimension and thus open themselves up to Stroop interference. Another variable of context, the relative salience of the constituent dimensions, also affected performance with the more discriminable dimension disrupting selective attention to the less discriminable dimension. The results demonstrate the importance of context in engendering the failure of selective attention and challenge traditional automaticity accounts of the Stroop effect.

A symmetrical 6 x 6 factorial design of distances and durations served to produce either 36 different moving stimuli (real movement condition) or 36 static displays separately containing the respective stimulus components (cognitive movement condition). Different metric rules underlay the two types of velocity judgments: Perceptual estimations of real movement obeyed a ratio model, whereas conscious estimations of implied movement obeyed an additive model. Valuation operations differed, too; the scales underlying real velocity were nonlinearly related to the even more compressive scales that underlay cognitive velocity. Implications of these results for velocity research are discussed.