Introduction

You are an experienced driver sitting at a red light waiting to go through an unfamiliar intersection. Then the green arrow indicating an advanced green for the left-turning lane appears and you take your foot off the brake, even though it’s not your turn to go! Why? Because of your extensive driving experience, you automatically process that green light as a signal to go. This automatic processing is referred to as automaticity, and people use it for a wide variety of familiar stimuli in the world around them. By automatically processing familiar stimuli, we leave valuable attentional resources available for processing new and unexpected stimuli. Occasionally, however, the automatic processing is a bit of an inconvenience, such as in the advanced green light example. The Stroop task used in this experiment will effectively demonstrate automatic processing.