Intro Of The Stroop Effect: Cognitive Psychology

The Stroop effect is demonstrated by the reaction time to determine a color when the color is printed in a different color’s name. Participants respond slower or make more errors when the meaning of the word is incongruent with the color of the word. Despite knowing the meaning of the word, participants showed incapability of ignoring the stimulus attribute. This reflects a clear instance of semantic interference and an unfathomed failure of selective attention (Stroop, 1935).

multitasking manNational Public Radio recently reported on the the University of Michigan using an MRI scanner to monitor the brain activity of test subjects doing different tasks. One thing that researcher Daniel Weissman (a neuroscientist) found was that when the subjects went from one task to the next, that the brain had to pause and gather up what it knew of that task before moving on to the action that needed to be

An interesting challenge arises when a task such as color naming is identified as both controlled and automatic, by varying the other task involved. Color naming is identified as a controlled process when the other task is word reading, but as an automatic process when the other task is shape naming. Cohen, Dunbar and McClelland (1990) proposed an alternative explanation of the Stroop effect, which does not distinguish between automatic and controlled processing. Instead, they proposed that automaticity is a range, and that Stroop interference depends on the relative degree of learning the particular tasks, not on processing speed.

The Stroop effect was tested on four different tasks. Nineteen Queens College students were recruited by flyer, and each were assigned to a word reading task, color reading task, color inhibition task, and word inhibition task. They were timed using a stopwatch function on a cell phone, to name the color, or word to the quickest of their ability. In the order from longest reaction time to shortest: inhibition color naming task, color naming task, inhibition word reading, and word reading. This study shows that people can read words more quickly than they can name colors, and that inhibiting an automatic response to color/word tasks will take longer to do than tasks that do not involve inhibition.

The idea of a Stroop Effect may sound ridiculous to someone; however, based on its purpose it may not be. For instance, it is used in clinical studies as way of measuring selective attention, cognitive flexibility, and processing speed and cognitive control. Because of such an experiment, researchers have found that interference to a large extent in brain damage, mental disorder, ADHD (Attention Deficit / Hyperactive Disorder), etc.

Controlled Vs Automatic processes: A modified version of a Stroop experiment using colour-associated and colour neutral words.

In the 1930’s, psychologists wanted to better understand how the brain processes presented information. To take it a step further, they wanted to see what happened when conflicting factors were presented and how the brain would process it. Would there be a delayed response? Would there be an error when giving the response? Psychologists were especially interested in how conflicting factors would inhibit the rate of impulse transmission in the nervous system (Eberle, 2012) and in 1935 John Ridley Stroop came up with an experiment to test the response rate of people when they were presented with conflicting factors.

In 1935, the Stroop Effect was first established by John Ridley Stroop. Research done by John Ridley Stroop emphasizes the processing of words that it has on the more studious challenge of naming just the ink color. The Stroop Effect is a proof of interference in the reaction time of an exercise. In the Stroop Effect, subjects are tested only on naming colors of incompatible words and of control patches (MacLeod 1991). Many tests can be distributed, all varied in the colors and words. Any color can be used; the same goes with any word being used. Subjects receive a time of how long it took them to read each test; where the subjects find a time difference between the different tests. When taking some of these tests, people may experience a mental sensation comparable to running in a swimming pool (Bower 1992).

The Stroop effect: how your brain reacts to conflicting information You can’t always believe what you see. You may have learned your colors before you learned how to read, but what happens when there is conflict between both color recognition and word recognition? The Stroop effect uses the conflict between words and colors to show, how your brain reacts to the conflicting information between the two. By psychologist definition the Stroop effect is a demonstration of interference in the reaction time of a task. The Stroop effect was originally written about by a man named John Ridley Stroop in the 1930’s.

In his historic study, Stroop found that reading names of colors interfered with individuals’ ability to name the ink color the word was printed in when the two differed (i.e., the word “BLUE” written in red ink) (1935). However, the basis of this phenomenon can be traced back to Cattell who found that naming colors and pictures took twice as long to accomplish than reading the word these colors or pictures represented (1886). He concluded that this was due to reading being an automatic process while identifying colors or pictures requires a conscious effort (Cattell, 1886). MacLeod (1991) reflects that it was Cattell’s work which strongly influenced future psychologist including Stroop.

In psychology, the Stroop effect is a demonstration of interference----prepotent response. In the reaction time of a task. Stroop did an experiment in 35 years. The stimuli he used were in conflict with the colors used in Book 2 and found that when the name of a color (eg, "blue", "green", or "red") Is printed in a color that is not indicated

The Stroop Effect experiment generalized selective attention and how it affects our everyday thinking. The experiments main focus depicts how selective attention impacts our everyday lives and how efficient/ effective our thinking process can be. It is a classical phenomenon well versed in experimental psychology. The stroop tasks describes a task in which participants must identify color names printed in an opposing color of the presented word and read color names where the color of the print is the same as the word.

If the reaction time between the stimulus and the response increases when the colour of the word and the word itself are not the same, then the reaction time would decrease when the word and the colour of the word are the same. The Stroop effect is an observable way to view the difficulties the brain has in identifying conflicting sensory information. The conflicting sensory data that people are given will affect the time of their responses and impact on their ability to read the information out correctly and fluently.

In 1935, John Ridley Stroop conducted an experiment at George Peabody College for teachers in the United States. Stroop used 70 college undergraduates as subject in his experiment, he compared times for reading names of colours and naming colours themselves. The aim was to determine if the colour of the word affected the ability to read it. In the experiment, there was three different conditions. In the first condition participants were asked to read words as quickly as possible whereas participants had to name the ink colour in which each word were printed as quickly as possible in second condition. In a third condition (the incongruent condition), participants had to name the ink colour in which each word was printed, but in this condition the words themselves were colour names. For example, the word ‘GREEN’ was presented in the colour orange and you were required to read this colour instead of the word itself. Stroop found that the participants were much slower at naming the ink colours when the stimuli were themselves colours as (third condition), indicating that a possible explanation for the Stroop effect is that people quickly and automatically process the meaning of the word.

We are replicating J.R. Stroop’s original experiment The Stroop Effect (Stroop, 1935). The aim of the study was to understand how automatic processing interferes with attempts to attend to sensory information. The independent variable of our experiment was the three conditions, the congruent words, the incongruent words, and the colored squares, and the dependent variable was the time that it took participants to state the ink color of the list of words in each condition. We used repeated measures for the experiment in order to avoid influence of extraneous variables. The participants were 16-17 years of age from Garland High School. The participants will be timed on how long it takes them to say the color of the squares and the color of the words. The research was conducted in the Math Studies class. The participants were aged 16-17 and were students at Garland High School. The results showed that participants took the most time with the incongruent words.