The Stroop Task And Further Exploration Essay

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 Stroop (1935) effect is the inability to ignore a color word when the task is to report the ink color of that word (i.e., to say "green" to the word RED in green ink). The present study investigated whether object-based processing contributes to the Stroop effect. According to this view, observers are unable to ignore irrelevant features of an attended object (Kahneman & Henik, 1981). In three experiments, participants had to name the color of one of two superimposed rectangles and to ignore words that appeared in the relevant object, in the irrelevant object, or in the background. The words were congruent,

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 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

The experiment is a demonstration of reaction time of a task . The Stroop experiment employs two basic processes of cognition; attention (“the concentration of mental effort on sensory or mental events”) and automaticity (“a cognitive process that does not require conscious thought as a result of existing cognitive structures

The Stroop effect is the description of a delay in response to a test, usually linking word to visual. The effect is that, if the written word and the font color are not the same, then there is a delay in response compared to congruent colors and words. The primary experiment around this was when people were presented with words which were color names printed in a different color from the word itself. The word "RED" was printed in blue, and were asked to quickly identify the color of the word - in many cases, people would say what the word said, rather than the color. In the lab, humans would say "red" instead of blue.

In this lab, the team concluded that being distracted with an activity that diverts optical attention away from the focal point, such as texting, significantly increases reaction time. The other distractors, including listening to music and talking on a cell phone, had effectively no impact on reaction time in comparison to having no distraction.

While taking the Stroop test your brain is trying to say the word because words are a stronger influence than colors. This then causes conflict in your brains, mental tasks. When you look at one of the words, you are seeing both the color and an opposite meaning which forces your brain to make a decision on which one it should focus on. John Stroop’s theory is that interference happens because people can read a word faster than saying a color because color is more complex, taking more time to correctly

In the third and final part of his experiment, Stroop (1935) examined how practice could impact reaction times. Over a two week period, participants practiced various tasks which used colored words, names of colors and colored blocks. It was found that practice decreased reaction time when naming ink color when it conflicted with the name of the color (i.e., answering “RED” for BLUE) and that such interference could disappear if newly established (Stroop, 1935). The second discovery during this part of the experiment was that reaction times for reading the name of the color and naming the ink color were almost equal at the end of the practice period (Stroop, 1935). Even though this resulted in a significant increase in reaction time for reading the name of the color (i.e., saying “BLUE” for BLUE), Stroop concluded that this equaling of reaction times signified that the interference between the automated process of reading and the conscious process of naming the ink color could disappear with practice (1935).

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.

Would practice effect Stroop interference and if so what would this tell us about the Stroop Effect (MacLeod, 1991)? This question was investigated by having participants learn names of Armenian letters and then read the small English and Armenian letters that were composed to form large English and Armenian letters respectively (McLeod, 1991). The results provided evidence that interference was the same for both English (practiced) and Armenian letters (McLeod, 1991). Why then does automatic reading make one susceptible to the Stroop Effect? A possible explanation is attention. During automatic processing, more attention goes to processing the information in dimension a than in dimension b. Processing and naming ink color requires more attention than reading, and so reading will cause interference because it requires less attention (McLeod,

The “Stroop Test” or “Stroop Effect”, gets its unique name from Dr. John Ridley Stroop; in the 1930’s. The Stroop effect, charts a person’s reaction time to the task; these results will show the nature of the individual automatic processing versus their conscious visual control. The Stroop Effect involves positively identifying the color of the word listed instead of the word itself; as fast as possible. The test is based on two types of trails; congruent when words and colors match and incongruent when the words and colors do not match. The Stroop Test is a test that examines ones’ cognitive skills and level. According to Zaps, cognitive tests examine cognition, which is the mental activity that includes thinking and the understanding

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.