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Essay on Testing the Theory of Multitasking

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This experimental investigation has to do with how human’s attention work. It is based on a replication of the well-known “Stroop Effect” carried out on 1935 by John Ridley Stroop. The aim of this experiment was to demonstrate how hard it is for a person’s attention to be divided in different tasks, by making the participants read a series of three stimuli which consisted of: 1) words of colors in black ink, 2) words of colors in their actual font color, and 3) color words with different ink, where the participant read the font instead of the word present. The research hypothesis supposed that selective attention is as easy to be performed visually as well as audibly. The controlled variable of the experiment were the black ink color …show more content…

The “Stroop Effect” is a notorious experiment in which John Ridley Stroop revealed and observed how a person’s attention works partially by portraying simple yet complicated activities for the brain to decipher what they are really being asked to do. The participants had to react verbally when presented the series of stimuli as fast as they can with the minimum amount of mistakes they can evade. It is also of vital importance to point out how attention can become automatic through time in which people become used to things such as reading words’ color instead of the word; this can also confuse the person depending on their ability to concentrate, but still it will always be difficult to decode two tasks that have become automatic to a person. In the case study, the participants were shown three different types of stimuli which involved congruent color words of black ink, matching font color of the words, and finally instead of reading the word presented, they had to read the color of the word. As the stimuli were presented to each of the participants, it was noticeable that as the difficulty level increased, mistakes began to appear and there was a slight but relevant difference of increasing average time. Although there are many factors that makes the experiment not precise, it gives a generalized picture of how automatic a person’s reaction can become throughout time of experience and learning.

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