Chapter 1. Stroop Effect
1.1 Introduction
Stroop Effect
Do you know your colors? Try this task and see how quickly you can identify the colors presented. You want to be as fast and as accurate as you can be. Be careful, as there are a few surprises in store.
1.2 Experiment Setup
1.3 Instructions
Instructions
You will need to press the space bar to begin the experiment. At the beginning of a set of trials, a fixation mark will appear. Please look at this mark. After it is removed, you will be presented with a stimulus. Your task will be to name the color of the stimulus as quickly and accurately as possible. You may use either the buttons on the screen or the keyboard to give your responses. The color may be in a word, some other string of letters, or it may be a box. In all cases you are to respond to the color of the word, letters, or box.
| KEYBOARD Response | What Response Means |
|---|---|
| r | Red |
| g | Green |
| b | Blue |
| y | Yellow |
1.4 Experiment
Begin Experiment
1.5 Results
Results
1.6 Debriefing
Debriefing
Attention is often defined as the ability to focus on one stimulus while ignoring another. We must select some small fraction of all that is going on around us on which to focus or we would be overwhelmed. You can read this screen and block out the music you are listening to, or listen to your professor and ignore what the students are saying in the row behind you. This is called selective attention. Selecting one stimulus over another is one of the key tasks of attention. Generally we are very good at this task, but the Stroop Effect suggests that there are limits; some stimuli demand our cognitive processing.
J. Ridley Stroop (1935) developed this fiendish little task that demonstrates that some cognitive abilities cannot easily be shut off. The task seems terribly simple: just name the colors that are in front of you. But the trick is that sometimes the word is a different color than the color you are trying to name. This is the incongruent condition. Having participated several times in this task, I can safely predict that several times you initially wanted to respond, and might have even responded, with the word instead of the color in the incongruent condition. You have been reading for many years and are very good at it.
This interference from the word with naming the color suggests that we process the word even though we would like to attend only to the color. We seem to have no ability to not read the word. This lack of an ability to control the reading of the word suggests that the basic process of reading a very familiar word does not require attention, or at least not much attention. These types of cognitive processes are said to be automatic. Automatic cognitive processes, by not requiring attention, happen outside of attentional control but also free up attention for other cognitive tasks.
References:
Brown, T. L., Joneleit, K., Robinson, C. S., & Brown, C. (2002). Automaticity in reading and the Stroop task: Testing the limits of involuntary word processing. The American Journal of Psychology, 115(4), 515-543.
Stroop, J. R. (1935). Studies of interference in serial verbal reactions. Journal of Experimental Psychology, 18, 643-662.
1.7 Quiz
Quiz