Stroop interference and disorders of selective attention

Fourteen patients with right-hemisphere CVA and 8 patients with a left-hemisphere CVA were examined for selective attention deficits using a variant of the Stroop color-word task: the picture-word interference task. Experiments 1 and 2 first compared the performance of the two patient groups and a control group in three tasks of increasing difficulty: picture-word detection, word reading, and picture naming. The results showed that (a) the two patient groups were significantly slower than the control group, but did not differ from each other, and (b) the difference in mean RT between the two patient groups and the control group did not increase with task difficulty. In Experiment 3, the subjects were required to name pictures while ignoring accompanying distractors: nonletter symbols, unrelated words or semantically related words. In this task, the right hemisphere patients showed a much larger semantic interference effect than both the left hemisphere patients and the control group. It is argued that this finding most probably reflects problems in visual selective attention with the right hemisphere patients.