Discussion
The reaction time for the neutral naming list was the fastest of all the lists. The second fastest reaction time was for the congruent counting list, followed by the neutral counting list and the incongruent counting list had the slowest reaction time. Based on these results; some hypotheses were supported as well as there were some that were not supported. One hypothesis that was proposed was that if naming numbers is automatic then the neutral naming list should be faster than the neutral counting list. This hypothesis was supported as in fact the reaction time for the neutral naming list was significantly faster than the neutral counting list.
These results were similar to those findings of Windes’ study where he proposed that naming certain characteristics of words was actually faster than the naming the characteristics themselves, however in his experiment Windes used color rather than numbers. The results of his experiment showed that interference is not only specific to color naming; but is also specific in number stimuli as I was able to support in my study of Stroop interference in numbers. Similar to my proposition, Windes showed that whatever influences us to make a certain response may also influence us to focus on the general characteristic rather than the specific.
Another hypothesis that was proposed was if the automatic process of naming interferes with counting then participants should read the incongruent counting list slower than the neutral naming list. This too was supported and the results showed that naming does interfere with counting as majority of the participants were sidetracked with the reading aspect of the list and thus had slower performance on the counting aspect.
Facilitation was also tested in this study, similar to Hintzman’s study of color naming Stroop task. If the automatic process of naming numbers facilitates the effortful process of counting numbers then the participants should complete the...