Is the Musical Stroop Effect Able to Keep Its Promises?: A Reply to Akiva-Kabiri and Henik (2014), Gast (2014), Moeller and Frings (2014), and Zakay (2014)

Grégoire, Perruchet, and Poulin-Charronnat (2013) claimed that the Musical Stroop task, which reveals the automaticity of note naming in musician experts, provides a new tool for studying the development of automatisms through extensive training in natural settings. Many of the criticisms presented in the four commentaries published in this issue appear to be based on a misunderstanding of our procedure, or questionable postulates. We maintain that the Musical Stroop Effect offers promising possibilities for further research on automaticity, with the main proviso that the current procedure makes it difficult to tease apart facilitation and interference.