Exploration Of The Theory Of Habituation By Using Visual Stroop Task

Habituation of the orienting response is a well-known phenomenon that has been suggested as the attentional inhibition mechanism. Researchers have not reach agreement about what types of features are included in the mental representation and what kinds of habituation may facilitate the later processing. Elliot(2001)explored the differences using the cross-modal Stroop task. But the speeds of processing auditory and visual stimulus may be different.Besides.it is controversial whether the two paths share the same source. Therefore there is limitation in exploration with cross-modal Stroop task. There is no exploration in only visual path till now. The research combines the visual Stroop task and Latent Inhibition task. The results of three experiments are demonstrated as following:1. What the mental representation of distractors includes is some response-relevant information, not response-irrelevant information. Attentional selection may take place in the different period , which is related to the task demand.2. The habituation to stimulus in the former period will facilitate the later processing no matter whether the meanings of stimulus in the two periods are same or not.3. If the preexposures are the distractors in the test, higher level attention to the preexposures will induce participants to attend more to the distractor at test, increasing its effect.