• Korean Journal of Cognitive Science
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• v.26 no.1
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• pp.27-51
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• 2015

The present study tested the effect of a top-down influence on recalling the colors of Stroop words. Participants remembered the colors of 1, 2, 3 or 6 Stroop words. After 1 second of a memory delay, they were asked to recall the color of a cued Stroop word by selecting out its corresponding color on a color-wheel stimulus. The correct recall was defined when the participants chose a color that was within ${\pm}45^{\circ}$ from the exact location of Stroop word's color on the color-wheel. Otherwise, the recall was defined as incorrect. The analyses of the frequency distribution of the participants' responses in the error trials showed that the probability of choosing the color-name of the target Stroop word was higher than the probability of other five color-names on the color-wheel. Further analyses showed that increasing the number of Stroop words to manipulate memory load did not affect the probability of the Stroop interference. These results indicate that the top-down interference by Stroop manipulation may induce systematic distortion of the stored representation in visual working memory.

• Korean Journal of Cognitive Science
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• v.28 no.1
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• pp.27-42
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• 2017

Stroop effect(Stroop, 1935) is a reliable paradigm which has been used in various psychological research. Although classic Stroop experiment used color and color name for experimental stimuli, subsequent research reported that a color(e.g. green) and an object(e.g. grass) which displays a typical color show similar effects depending on color-object congruency(Klein, 1964). Because past research that used Stroop effect to investigate semantic representation tested association between concrete object and color, they predominantly used concrete nouns and their corresponding color names as stimuli(e.g. Dalrymple-Alford, 1968, 1972; Klein, 1964). Recently, Sherman and Clore(2009) reported that response time to white or black words is affected by moral value of words (e.g., honesty, crime) even when the words do not have specific referents. Based on this result, we tested association between thermesthesia-related adjectives(e.g., 따스한, 냉정한) and color(warm color, cold color) using Stroop task. The results showed that subjects were faster in their response to color when adjective-color was congruent than when incongruent, and there was an interaction between color and meaning of adjectives. The Stroop effect in this research is unique because, contrary to previous research that used concrete nouns, the effect was obtained even with abstract adjectives which do not have specific referents. In addition, unlike Sherman and Clore(2009) that used achromatic color, our results show that Stroop effect obtains between abstract adjectives and chromatic color.

• Journal of Gifted/Talented Education
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• v.25 no.4
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• pp.469-491
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• 2015

The present study investigated the inhibition mechanisms of gifted children, which is one of the main executive functions in human cognitive system. The inhibition process was subdivided into cognitive and emotion aspects in order to examine the interplay between these two aspects with respect to inhibition processing. In Experiment 1, word-color Stroop task was used to study the cognitive inhibition process of 100 gifted children(Gender: 62 males, 38 females; Academic grade: 46 Elementary school students, 54 Secondary school students). In addition, emotional Stroop task was utilized in Experiment 2 to examine the effect of emotional component during cognitive inhibition process. Results revealed a significant cognitive cost (i.e., word-color Stroop effect) when participants had to withhold automatic response during cognitive inhibition task in Experiment 1. Such cognitive cost was reduced as the chronological age of the participants increased, with no difference in gender. The results in Experiment 2 showed no significant emotional inhibition cost (i.e., emotional Stroop effect) during cognitive inhibition task, and there was no effect of gender nor age. This suggests that the emotional component conveyed in words did not lead to cognitive bias effects. This study proposes that the cognitive and emotional inhibition processes are seemingly independent mechanisms that engage in complex interactions during inhibition processing of behavioral response.

• Korean Journal of Cognitive Science
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• v.27 no.3
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• pp.377-406
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• 2016

Current lists of the Korean emotion words either do not consider word frequency, or only include emotion expression words such as 'joy' while disregarding emotion inducing words like 'heaven'. Also, none of the current lists contains the concreteness level of the emotional words. Therefore, the current study aimed to develop a new Korean affect word list that makes up such limitations of the current lists. To do so, in experiment 1, valence, arousal and concreteness ratings of the 450 Korean emotion expression nouns and emotion inducing nouns were surveyed with 399 participants. In addition, in experiment 2, an emotional stroop task was performed with the newly developed word list to test the usefulness of the list. The results showed clear patterns of the congruency effects between emotional words and emotion expressing faces. Increased response times and more errors were found when the emotion of the words and faces are non-matched, than when they were matched. The result suggested that the newly developed Korean affect word list can be effectively adapted to studies examining the influence of various aspects emotion.

• Journal of the Korean Society of Physical Medicine
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• v.5 no.2
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• pp.211-221
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• 2010

Purpose : The purpose of this study is to find out the effects of combined exercise including walking and yoga on cognitive functions in the elderly women. Methods : Sixteen elderly women aged above 65 are invited in this study. Each subject participated in exercise three times a week for eight weeks from July 14th to September 13th in 2008. The changes between pre and post exercise are analyzed by Wilcoxon sign rank test and repeated ANOVA test with SPSS (ver 17.0) package program. Results : After exercise, In the below 23 points group, only interference STROOP test (p<.05) among sub items of Cognition Scale for Older Adults (CSOA) is improved significantly. In the above 24 points group, words memory (p<.05), delayed recall (p<.05), and picture naming (p<.05) among sub items of CSOA are improved significantly. But it is no different to the change patterns among two groups. Conclusion : These results show that combined exercise including walking and yoga is helpful to improve cognitive functions. And we find that exercise is helpful in the above 24 points elderly women more than in the below 23 points.

• Journal of the Korean Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry
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• v.13 no.1
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• pp.76-84
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• 2002

Objectives：This study was conducted to investigate the effect of oxygen on attention and memory functions in healthy adolescents. Methods：The participant subjects were recruited from local advertisement. All subjects are students attending ordinary middle and high school. Their degree of achievement was average or below average. Before the study, its nature and purpose were fully explained to the patients and their parents, and a written informed consent was obtained from each child's parent and a written assent from each child for entire the procedure. The Ethics Committee and Clinical Research Committee of Gyeongsang National University Hospital approved the protocol. For baseline assessment, all subjects received tests for attention and memory. All tests were conducted by a certified psychologist. Stroop test, continuous performance test and trail making test A and B were used for evaluation of attention. As memory tests, we used memory assessment scale(MAS), standardized memory assessment tools. Ten to fourteen days after initial assessments, same tests was applied to the same subjects after prior 5 minute oxygen inhalation. Results：1) Attention test：Improved performances in trail making part B, and stroop test were found in normobaric oxygen inhalation group compared to air inhalation group. Improved reaction time in those tests seemed to reflect the enhanced executive prefrontal activity. 2) Memory test：More words and digits memorization were found in short-term memory subscale score in MAS in oxygen inhalation group compared to air inhalation group. This finding suggested the improved working memory function after oxygen inhalation. Conclusion：Though interpreted cautiously, these results suggested that normobaric oxygen inhalation could enhance executive function and working memory of prefrontal lobe. Further study, however, should be performed to investigate the mechanism of effects of oxygen on cognitive enhancement.

• Phonetics and Speech Sciences
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• v.10 no.3
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• pp.1-8
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• 2018

The vowel /o/ in Seoul Korean has been undergoing a sound change by altering the acoustic weighting of F2 and F1. Studies documented that this on-going change redefined the nature of a /o/-/u/ contrast as F2 differences rather than as F1 differences. The current study examined two cognitive factors namely executive function capacity (EF) and autistic traits, in terms of their roles in explaining who in speech community would adapt new acoustic forms of the target vowels, and who would retain the old forms. The participants, 55 college students speaking Seoul Korean, produced /o/ and /u/ vowels in isolated words; and completed three EF tasks (Digit N-Back, Stroop, and Trail-Making Task), and an Autism screening questionnaire. The relationships between speakers' cognitive task scores and their utilizations of F1 and F2 were analyzed using a series of correlation tests. Results yielded a meaningful relationship in participants' EF scores interacting with gender. Among the females, speakers with higher EF scores were better at retaining F1, which is a less informative cue for females since they utilized F2 more than they did F1 in realizing /o/ and /u/. In contrast, better EF control among male speakers was associated with more use of the new cue (F2) where males still utilized F1 as much as F2 in the production of /o/ and /u/ vowels. Taken together, individual differences in acoustic realization can be explained by individuals' cognitive abilities, and their progress in the sound change further predicts that cognitive ability influences the utilization of acoustic information which is non-primary to the speaker.

• Korean Journal of Cognitive Science
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• v.25 no.2
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• pp.109-133
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• 2014

Psychological distance refers to the perceived gap between a stimulus and a person's direct experience and its activation influences the decisions and actions that the person makes towards the stimulus. We investigated whether the level of familiarity affects the construction of psychological distance. Specifically, we hypothesized that a familiar stimulus, relative to an unfamiliar stimulus, is perceived to be psychologically closer to the observer and so its perception might be modulated by the perceived spatial distance. The familiarity of stimuli was manipulated in terms of preexposure frequency and preexposure perceptual fluency. In experiments, participants were first exposed with three nonsense words in a lexical decision task. The nonsense words were presented in nonword trials with different levels of frequency (frequent vs. rare, Experiment 1) or with different levels of visibility (less blurred vs. more blurred, Experiment 2). Participants then performed a distance Stroop task with the most familiar and the least familiar nonwords. Each of them appeared in either proximal or distant spatial locations in scenes with clear depth cues. The results showed a significant interaction between the word familiarity and the spatial distance: the familiar word was judged faster in proximal locations but slower in distant locations relative to the unfamiliar word. The current findings suggest that metacognitive evaluation of familiarity could be one of the critical factors that underlie the construction of psychological distance.