The Stroop Effect Experiment

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The Stroop experiment can be traced back as far as the nineteen century around the time of some particular works of Cattell and Wundt. The experiment was first written about in 1929 in German. The experiment was name after John Ridley Stroop after he had written the article “Studies of interference in serial verbal reactions,” which was published in 1935.there have been over 700 replications of this experiment

The experiment is a demonstration of reaction time of a task . The Stroop experiment employs two basic processes of cognition; attention (“the concentration of mental effort on sensory or mental events”) and automaticity (“a cognitive process that does not require conscious thought as a result of existing cognitive structures or highly practiced tasks.”). The Stroop Effect is all about being able to say the colour of the word and not the colour the word are saying. For example, the word “red” is portraying the colour green so instead of saying the colour is red you say green. It said that it is easier to make out the colour when it is the same as the word “red” (congruent) than saying the colour of the word when the word has a different color than it is portraying “blue” (incongruent). In this case it is that inference is taking place.

Upon choosing an experiment to do, one stumbled upon of the experiment of the Stroop Effect under the categories of attention and automaticity. It created an intrigue in one, which caused one to choose it as his or her experiment. Firstly, after clicking on the experiment, one had to choose the setting that best suited him or her. One chose to do two trials of the experiment. The first trial one chose to have the condition to be congruent words, the colour of the words to be red,...

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...colours are read at a slower rate when they do not match with words with a different colour. Also, they stated what causes the actual interference is when two responses are competing for responses that should be produced. All in all, this can affect the reading reaction time. In some cases the reaction time can be as perfect. That is when it only has congruent word, and sometimes it may not be so perfect because of interference. This can be caused by incongruent words.

Reference

Maclin, M.K, Maclin, O.H, Soslo, R.L (2008).Cognitive Psychology (8th ed). Boston: Pearson Education, Inc.

Schwartz, D (2003). The Stroop Effect. Retrieved November 12, 2009 from: http://www.psych.wright.edu/gilk-classes/Psy300_F03/stroop1.pdf

Wikipedia. (2009). The Stroop Effect. Retrieved November 12, 2009 from:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stroop_effect#Original_experiment

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