Understanding the Stroop Effect: A Cognitive Study

The Stroop effect was first done by John Riley Stroop in the 1930’s. The Stroop effect is when the name of a color is written in another color. The goal here is to be able to read the color instead of the word. This is an obstacle for many people because it is hard to focus on the reading of the color, instead of the word. When we look at words, our brain processes the word faster even when we don’t want too. Another way to look at this is by the horse race model, the minute we look at a word, our brain begins a race, just like two horses. Our brain only focus is the one horse(word) and not the color (second horse). Once it reaches the finish line our responds are the word (first horse) instead of the actual color. Our experimental class retested the hypothesis, to see if congruent response was faster than incongruent. Based on our results we could say that there was a significantly difference between congruent and incongruent response.

When conducting a Stroop experiment we look at reaction time. Reaction time is measured when reading names of colors and when naming words. There is research that provide us with information that says that

The horse-race model estimates for the main effects of word to conclude that identification is faster than color identification. Conflicting color would interfere with name of ink of the color in which word is printed resulting in Stroop effect. It’s shown in research that words are read faster than naming the colors (Macleod 1991). The prediction for the main effects of congruency is that the overall congruent trial should be faster with shorter reaction time than incongruent trials. The prediction for interaction is that there should be interaction because when the task is to name the word, the word information is processed quicker, the color information is going to cause a lesser amount of conflict and if the word information is processed first then the color processing becomes