Feature Competition and Its Representational Origins in Vision Language Models: Evidence from the Stroop Paradigm

When you ask a vision-language model (VLM) a question with an image, it answers your question based on the image. But to act means to choose: saying one thing means choosing to respond not say another. This becomes an issue when the image contains multiple features that equally relate to the question at hand: how would VLMs choose to respond? This problem is precisely studied by the classical Stroop task in psychology: among a set of deliberately designed images whose text and color conflicts (e.g., RED), participants are instructed to report the color. We adapt this psychological paradigm to a benchmark and prompted a range of contrastive and generative VLMs on their behavior. Across models, we observe a persistent bias toward the feature of text in Stroop images: when text and color disagree, models preferentially generate responses centered to the text rather than color. We then opened the black box and examined the source of this bias and why certain features influences the model's behavior more than others. In the embedding space, we found that textual cues are represented more strongly and separably than color cues. This representational asymmetry predicts intervention success: steering models toward text-related directions is substantially easier than steering them toward color-related directions. Using a classical psychological paradigm, we demonstrate, at both behavioral and representational levels, that distinct features within the same image can exert unequal influence on VLM behavior. Our findings suggest that VLMs assign different degrees of saliency to different features within the same image, highlighting the need to understand how cue-specific saliency shapes their performance in widely used downstream applications.