5.3.2. Experiment 2

We suggested that the effects of Experiment 1 resulted from the relatively low competition between emotional processing and target processing, but it was not clear that presentation of an emotional stimulus with an ISI could really reduce processing competition. To better understand the relationship between processing interference and the size of the ISI, we measured colour-naming latency and varied the ISI between colour words and colour patches (Experiment 2), and between emotional faces and colour patches (Experiment 3). Because an emotional stimulus produces a small bias effect, we used the Stroop task to measure interference across ISIs.