The Color Recognition Bias in Stroop Interference in Kanji Letter Matching Task

In humans’ new and complex environments, cognitive control is required for adaptive behavior. The Stroop effect holds that when color information recognized from the color of a word/character image and its meaning do not match, humans cannot intuitively understand the information, or understand it correctly. Therefore, they take time to understand it. Until now, research on the Japanese Stroop task has focused mainly on differences in stimulus character systems (kanji and kana) and brain processing sites, but there has been no detailed research on color. The Japanese language has two writing systems. Kanji is a Chinese character representing meaning, and kana is used to represent syllable sounds. Therefore, in this study, a short-term memory color test of the Stroop task was conducted with visual stimuli using the three primary colors (red, blue, and green) and achromatic (gray) letter colors. The results showed that the expected Stroop effect was not confirmed, and that responses were significantly less accurate in the congruent condition than in the incongruent condition.

I. Introduction

Among mammals, the color vision ability of primates such as humans and monkeys is indispensable for distinguishing between edible fruits and toxic plants and can be said to be an important function that lotteries the evolution of primates [1]. A light incident into the eyeball is captured by a cone in the outermost layer of the retina. Then it is processed by neurons in the retina. Memory color on visual short-term memory is retained in the retina as visual sensory memory (VSM) for a very short period Among their process, information sent to the brain through the optic nerve extending from the retina is transmitted to the fourth visual cortex in the lower temporal lobe on the surface layer of the brain via the primary visual cortex, and visually short-term memory (VSTM) is temporarily registered. Although humans with color perception can instantly recognize many colors and process them in the brain, the mechanism of color memory has not yet been elucidated perfectly.