Investigating the Stroop Effect

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Introduction:

When a behavior or skill seems to no longer require direct

interaction, cognitive psychologists say it is automatized. Many

behaviors can become automatized: typing, reading, writing, bicycling,

piano playing, driving, etc. Automatization is interesting because it

is an important part of daily life. We perform a variety of

automatized behaviors quickly and effortlessly. In some cases people

report that they do not consciously know how the behavior is

performed, they just will it to happen, and it does happen. To explore

properties of automatized behaviors cognitive psychologists often put

observers in a situation where an automatized response is in conflict

with the desired behavior. This allows researchers to test the

behind-the-scenes properties of automatized behaviors by noting their

influence on more easily measured behaviors. This demonstration

explores a well-known example of this type of influence, the Stroop

effect.

Stroop (1935) noted that observers were slower to properly identify

the color of ink when the ink was used to produce color names

different from the ink. That is, observers were slower to identify red

ink when it spelled the word blue. This is an interesting finding

because observers are told to not pay any attention to the word names

and simply report the color of the ink. However, this seems to be a

nearly impossible task, as the name of the word seems to interfere

with the observer's ability to report the color of the ink.

A common explanation for the Stroop effect is that observers have

automatized the process of reading. Thus, the color names of the words

are always processed very quickly, regardless of the color of the ink.

On the other hand, identifying colors is not a task that observers

have to report on very often, and because it is not automatized it is

slower. The fast and automatic processing of the color name of the

word interferes with the reporting of the ink color.

The Stroop task, and its many variations, are a commonly used tool in

cognitive psychology to explore how different types of behaviors

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