Stroop Effect Lab Report

Introduction

Many tasks, such as walking to a known location or riding a bicycle, are considered to be part of a cognitive controlling system called the automatic level. Tasks that are performed as a routine are controlled by the environmental stimuli. Reading, unless put under pressure due to environmental factors, is viewed as an automatic level as it is a task that does not require a lot of effort. Automatic reading, for instance, is not based upon controlled attention and concentration, but is revolved around the habit of someone reading. Factors that can influence one’s ability to make automatic movements could interfere with the ease of a routine task. A factor that could affect a simple task such as reading would be the interference of a visual factor. The Stroop Effect, which was an experiment conducted by John Ridley Stroop in 1935, investigated the way an external factor, in this case the color of the ink, could interfere with the way an individual’s automaticity when reading. …show more content…
During the first experiment, the participants were asked to name the color that was written as quickly as they could. For example, if the word “blue” was written, in any type of ink color, the participant would have to say “blue”. For the second experiment, the participants were asked to say the name of the ink color that was printed. In this experiment, if the word “blue” was written in red, the participant would have to say “red”. After the last incongruent condition, Stroop realized that the participants were more likely to make errors, and were much slower, while naming the color of the ink rather than the word itself. Based off of the results, Stroop concluded that the presence of another factor, which was out of the routine, could interfere with the process of an automatic