The Stroop Effect

The Stroop Effect was given the name after an American psychologist Ridley Stroop looked into the observable fact in the 1930s. The Stroop effect is a presentation of the brains response period slowing down when it has to deal with contradictory material. This slowed down response period occurs due to an obstruction or a processing delay caused by challenging or mismatched tasks in the brain. There are many different theories on why the Stroop effect does occur which means that there is not one concluding description for it. One of the theories is the speed of processing hypothesis which states that the brain will process the word quicker than it will process the colour. Therefore, when the brain is challenged to say the colour first and not

The aim of the experiments was to demonstrate interference in serial verbal reactions with time taken to do a task. Seventy (14 males and 56 females) college undergraduates took part in the experiments. There were two different conditions in the first condition the participants read words printed in black and the second condition participants read colour word that was printed in a different colour. The results of this experiment show that there was no significant different in the time taken to read the words in the two conditions. Stroop hypothesis was that response time between stimulus and response will be longer when the font name and colour are different. Due to the results from the first experiment being insignificant Stroop conducted a second experiment that was slightly different. Participants were told to name colours rather than read words. There were again two conditions, the first condition participants said the colour of the coloured square and in the second conditions the participants read a word list printed in incongruent colours and said the colour of the ink and not the word. The results show that many participants took longer to do the second condition compared to the first. Many participants made more mistakes doing the second list as they were saying the word not the ink colour. Stroop on average found that it took the participants 74% more time to understand the name ink colours of the corresponding words (Stroop,