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Related Concept Videos

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Social Facilitation

Not all intergroup interactions lead to negative outcomes. Sometimes, being in a group situation can improve performance. Social facilitation occurs when an individual performs better when an audience is watching than when the individual performs the behavior alone. This typically occurs when people are performing a task for which they are skilled.
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Subliminal Perception01:15

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Related Experiment Video

Updated: May 16, 2026

Lexical Decision Task for Studying Written Word Recognition in Adults with and without Dementia or Mild Cognitive Impairment
06:48

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Published on: June 25, 2019

You can't Stroop a lexical decision: is semantic processing fundamentally facilitative?

James R Schmidt1, Jim Cheesman, Derek Besner

  • 1Department of Experimental Clinical and Health Psychology, Ghent University, Belgium. james.schmidt@ugent.be

Canadian Journal of Experimental Psychology = Revue Canadienne De Psychologie Experimentale
|December 5, 2012
PubMed
Summary

Related words help in word recognition but hinder color naming. This study shows semantic priming is always facilitative, while response competition in tasks like the Stroop effect only occurs with limited response options and requires identification.

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Area of Science:

  • Cognitive Psychology
  • Experimental Psychology
  • Psycholinguistics

Background:

  • Related prime words typically facilitate lexical decision tasks (e.g., 'doctor' aiding 'nurse').
  • Conversely, these related primes interfere with performance in tasks like the Stroop task (e.g., 'blue' slowing the naming of red).
  • Existing research presents differing findings on the role of semantic priming and response competition.

Purpose of the Study:

  • To investigate the underlying mechanisms causing divergent effects of related primes in lexical decision versus Stroop tasks.
  • To determine whether semantic connections are always facilitative or can also be inhibitory.
  • To identify the conditions under which response competition arises.

Main Methods:

  • Five experiments were conducted, manipulating stimulus novelty and set size.
  • Experiments 1 and 2 used novel stimuli, assessing lexical decisions and color word reading aloud.
  • Experiments 3-5 employed repeated stimuli, focusing on interference and facilitation in identification and lexical decision tasks under varying set sizes.

Main Results:

  • Novel stimuli (Experiments 1-2) showed facilitation in both lexical decision and color word reading when primed by incongruent associates.
  • Repeated stimuli (Experiments 3-4) demonstrated facilitation in lexical decisions but interference in identification with incongruent color words.
  • Interference in identification persisted even with large distractor sets if the target/response set was small (Experiment 5).

Conclusions:

  • Semantic connections appear to be exclusively facilitative across different tasks.
  • Response competition, leading to interference, is contingent upon a small set of repeated responses and the requirement for identification, not lexical decision.
  • Findings reconcile discrepancies in prior research by highlighting the critical role of task demands and response set size.