Picture-word interference and the response-exclusion hypothesis

In the picture–word interference (PWI) task, a variant of the Stroop task, pictures are presented, one at a time, along with a superimposed distractor word. Participants are instructed to name the pictures as quickly and accurately as possible while ignoring the distractor words (Rosinski, 1977). Recently, a theory has been proposed to account for the performance in the PWI: the response-exclusion hypothesis (hereafter REH; [Finkbeiner and Caramazza, 2006a], [Finkbeiner and Caramazza, 2006b], [Janssen et al., 2008] and [Mahon et al., 2007]; see also [Dhooge and Hartsuiker, 2010] and [Dhooge and Hartsuiker, 2011]). The aim of the present work is to test the REH against a set of published data. As it will become evident at the end of the paper, the REH fails the test.10 page(s