The Stoop Effect of Interference

The Stroop experiment by J. Ridley Stroop in 1935 was performed in order to analyze the reaction time of participant’s stimuli and desired results while also obtaining a collective result of color interference and word reading(Stroop, 1935; Lee & Chan, 2000). In the experiment three forms of the test were given, the first consisting of color patches, the second had the color words printed in black and the other was an incongruent test beaming the color did not match the color word

However, evidence from a recent series of experiments conducted by MacLeod and Dunbar (1988) suggests that the processes involved in the Stroop task may have not been inadequate. In their experiment they taught participants to use color words as names for arbitrary shapes that actually appeared in a neutral color. After 288 trials where there was a 72 trials per stimulus, participants could perform this shape-naming task without difficulty. At this point, the effect that ink color had on shape naming was tested by presenting participants with conflicting and congruent stimuli for example, shapes colored to conflict or agree with their assigned names. Ink color produced large interference and facilitation effects. However, when the task was reversed, and subjects were asked to state the color of the ink in which the

It was found that tasks involving colors cause more interference. These two studies were similar to the present experiment, as they both required participants to verbally name colors while inhibiting themselves from naming the typed color, as fast as possible.

In the Stroop (1935) experiment he has proved that the effect is going to be one of the two slower or faster. In the non-conflict, some of the participants had to read two sets of words: set one with word written in their contradicting word so this has made it to be conflicting. Stroop (1935) came out to find that there are different association of words and the colors. Stroop (1935) wanted to see if they had any differences in the reaction time when the association was conducted. He noticed that the participants took longer read the conflicting word rather than the actual name word. The non-conflict was much easier and faster to do.

In the control group, Stroop (1935) printed all of the words in black. In both conditions, Stroop (1935) printed the words twice in each row and twice in each column. Stroop (1935) did not print the colors in the corresponding color of ink and also did not repeat words in a row or column. For his first experiment, Stroop (1935) used 70 college student volunteers. Half of the students (half of each sex) completed the control, then the experimental sheet, then experimental sheet again, and then the control (Stroop, 1935).

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).

The experiment used the same red and green stimuli in each trial instead of other opponent colors such as black and white or blue and yellow. The small sample size studied could have also lead to random variation in the results.

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 aim of this experiment was to replicate the experiment Stroop (1935). This study was the basis of the Stroop effect, which says that common tasks such as identifying a color can be interfered by automated processes, such as reading.

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.

They were able to answer questions such as the reaction between the visual and verbal reactions. The impact in terms of degree of interference was also evident from the results. The source of interference are the study aspects; color and naming. The conflicting color and word stimuli had an impact on the time taken by the subjects to read the given world. The authors argue that this was due to lack of coherence between visual interpretation and the expected verbal reaction. The subject gender had an impact on the results. The females had a better verbal reaction time compared to the males. According to the authors, this could be attributed to how the two genders normally react to color stimuli. Ideally, women usually possess high color stimulus-response

This experiment was used to test the brain’s ability of speed to recall words and colors. The frontal lobe in the human brain is associated with word meaning. This original experiment was tested on several college undergraduates both males and females, while our experiment used high school students both male and females. Our experiment did support our hypothesis that the brain’s ability to recognize words and colors take a longer time to perceive. As predicted stimulus #3 was difficult for the participants to perform. The brain will send a completely different signal than the one word the participant believed it was going to be. Overall, our experiment expressed the idea that the selective attention theory is correct because the participants needed more time recall the color than the word itself for stimulus #3. Before we conducted the

Though the results may vary slightly from the original study, the overall outcome was the same; it took longer for the participants to complete the English color test versus the German color test. We can conclude reading is an automatic process and can interfere with conscious processes. One limitation of our study was the age range. Older people tend to have a more difficult time with their vision thus making it harder to distinguish between the various colors resulting in a longer reaction time. Another limitation is the setting of the test. None of the tests were conducted in a laboratory setting nor by the same person so the results may be skewed. Though the distractor made the test more difficult the overall task could be considered a low load task therefore the participant could have easily been distracted, also resulting in an increased reaction

The Stroop Effect is an interesting, yet complex, phenomenon that presents itself when someone attempts to say a color, yet ends up incorrectly calling the color something else, due to the word being different in some way than the actual color itself (Imbrosciano & Berlach, 2005). For example, imagine a person being asked to name the color of a certain word, such as blue, but instead of saying the correct color, they say what the word spells out, which could be red. This is caused by an interference between the color and the word, leading the brain to process two contrasting pieces of information, which in turns causes a person to not be able to properly focus on the actual task to their best ability (Imbrosciano & Berlach, 2005). The Stroop Effect has been tested in various ways over several decades, as it is a fascinating phenomenon yet easy to test for. In lab, we tested this effect on not only each other, but also on our colleagues outside of the classroom. The findings are very interesting, and worth explaining in extensive detail.

A recent study, researchers looked at different aspects of Stroop’s (1935) results to receive a better understanding of interference. Bindl, Bühner and Hilbert (2014) tested for the original Stroop effect using a position-word interference test to examine spatial recognition and color words. One of the two spatial position-word task was done manually in order to control