The Stroop Effect

Background:
The Stroop effect is a popular experiment conducted by John Ridley Stroop which consists of demonstrating that the brain has a difficult time trying to sort information out when observing conflicting information. Ridley Stroop is able to show that the human brain tries to suppress the input of something going in your brain when at the same time focusing on something else. The Stroop effect is still quite popular since it taps into the essentials of psychology, cognitive learning and therefore offers ideas for cognitive processes. The Stroop effect has been studied in several ways, among them; it has shown psychologists that the brain is wired to recognize words without effort. Furthermore, psychologists have concluded that reading is an automatic process that can’t be turned off. In other words, we tend to see the meanings or words consciously.

How is the experiment conducted?
• First of all, Stroop 3 separate sheets of paper with the color names on them and sheets with a color spelled but a different colored font.
• On the first sheet, Stroop proved that the effect of incompatible ink color on reading words out loud by asking a person to read what the words said.
• On sheet #2, Stroop proved that naming color out loud took about 47 seconds to name the ink color of the incongruent word, keeping in mind that he asked his volunteer to do the job for him.
• On sheet #3, Stroop proved that after practicing the incompatible words of the color shown on the sheet for 8 days made the time decrease.

Results:
Stroop found out that practice made the time in which the task was being done decrease. That naming colors result much slower than reading them.

Why the above results?
All of the above happened since the human brain is trained to automatically read everything one sees, which is why recognition of words made the process of reading the color easier than naming the color shown.

http://www.rit.edu/cla/gssp400/sbackground.html