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Stroop Effect Theory

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Introduction Human reaction time is a measurement of the time it takes a person to react mentally and physically to a stimulus. The concept has been extensively studied due to the great inconsistency in reaction time in different situations. The reason for this has been called interference as some variable interferes with a person’s ability to efficiently and appropriately responds to a stimulus. A psychologist that studied this is J. R. Stroop, the man behind the theory of the Stroop effect. The Stroop effect demonstrates that reaction time is longer for naming ink colour of a word than it is for reading the word itself. This is, arguably, due to parallel processing, which complicates multitasking. Parallel processing is simultaneous processing …show more content…

compared in congruent and incongruent wordlist Discussion J. R. Stroop (1935) in his study found that reaction time for reading words where colour is absent (words written in black ink), naming colours where words are absent, and reading words in colour had shorter reaction time than naming colours when words were present. My study, that was a condensed form of the Stroop experiment, got similar results. I found that reading words where colour is absent and reading words in colour have a significant difference. Reading words where colour is absent (condition 1) takes less time than condition 2; where the participant have to name the colour of the words. This indicates that there is a distinction between controlled and automatic processing. The average difference in time in seconds between the two conditions was 5.29 (≈ 5.288), which demonstrates a significant difference. Furthermore, the scores of both the conditions occurred closed to their means, due to the standard deviations, which were …show more content…

For this experiment, I had decided to not ask the participants about their eyesight due to ethical concerns. After the third and first male participants told us about his colour-blindness I decided to ask the following participants. For future experiment, in order to improve the study, I would ask all participants whether they have some degree of colour blindness in order to eliminate that confounding variable. The ethical implications of this may be discomfort for the participant; however, they have the right to withdraw from the experiment at any time during the experiment if they so wish

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