The Stroop Effect: Case Study On Perception, Thinking, And Performance

Within cognitive psychology, there have been numerous studies focusing on perception, thinking, and performance. Perception is the way you think about or understand someone or something. Thinking is the action of using your mind to produce ideas, decisions, memories. Performance is an activity that a person or group does to entertain an audience (Merriam Webster). In my group, I will be researching and experimenting the Stroop Effect with the case study of Dyer, 1973. The Stroop Effect was introduced by John Ridley Stroop, an American Psychologist, in 1935 in his Ph.D. thesis. This theory was to test a human’s mental flexibility. Stroop’s experiments consisted of Stroop comparing a contrasting his subjects reading and saying aloud a list of colors printed in black ink. Then, the subjects would read the same colors, but printed in random colors. Stoop concluded that it took the subjects close tot the same time to read both of the lists. Stroop then compared the naming of colors for a list of solid color squares with the naming of colors for a list of words printed in incongruent colors (rit). The color word such as purple would appear on the screen, but it would be written in a different color ink, like yellow. The subject then had to name the color of the
Flowers would show a color word like “yellow” and “blue” on a colored background. There was a pause with a blank screen, then the subjects were shown a two different colors that were half and half on the page, like yellow or blue. The subjects then had to indicate which color word initially was presented to them. “He did not investigate the influence of this paradigm on normal Stroop interference, however, and his task differs from traditional tasks in having a delayed, binary response”