No evidence of task co-representation in a joint Stroop task

Area of Science:

• Cognitive Psychology
• Social Psychology
• Neuroscience

Background:

• Cooperative tasks necessitate shared representations of goals and salient information.
• The Stroop task is a common paradigm for studying cognitive interference and attention.

Purpose of the Study:

• To investigate the influence of joint task representations on performance in a semantic identity-based interference task.
• To test the co-representation account, hypothesizing that shared task representations between partners would lead to mutual performance interference.

Main Methods:

• A joint Stroop task was employed where participants identified pixel colors while ignoring incongruent distractor words.
• Distractor words included those from the participant's own response set, the partner's response set, and neutral words.
• Follow-up experiments examined interference effects in the absence of a co-actor, including a non-social no-go condition.

Main Results:

• In the joint task, distractor words from a partner's response set caused interference comparable to words from one's own response set.
• Subsequent experiments revealed similar interference levels for other response sets even without a co-actor present.
• Both social (co-actor) and non-social (no-go) alternative response sets induced comparable interference.

Conclusions:

• The findings suggest that alternative response sets, irrespective of their social nature, are represented and influence behavior.
• This supports the theory of common coding, positing that all events, social or not, are processed similarly and can impact performance.
• Joint task representations do not uniquely explain the observed interference patterns; general response set activation is a key factor.