Competition and cooperation in colour-word Stroop effect: An association approach

Interference between two competing stimuli has been extensively studied in many research areas including attention, information processing and cognitive control.For this study, both competition and cooperation of stimuli are explained by the developed Hopfield based Stroop model within the classical colour-word Stroop effect paradigm. Competition of stimuli occurs when the task is to name the colour for an incompatible colour-word and its colour (e.g. a word RED written in green), meanwhile the cooperation among stimuli can be observed when congruence (e.g. a word RED written in red) between both facilitates the response to the colour name. The Hopfield network is chosen for several reasons; we address the Stroop phenomenon as an association problem, the competition and cooperation of Stroop stimuli meets the pattern processing nature of the Hopfield network and the recall algorithm in Hopfield is biologically realistic.We have shown that, with a relatively simple but biologically plausible neural network of a single Hopfield network, our model is also able to predict the Stroop effect in comparison to the human performance