Stroop Effect: Color And Word Meaning

Stroop Effect: Color and Word Naming
John Ridley (J.R.) Stroop, as described by C. Macleod (1991), was born into a farming community and was not expected to live past infancy, so he was sheltered by his family to protect him. Due to not having to do heavy farm work, Stroop focused on his education and graduated top of his class. He eventually received his Ph.D. in Experimental Psychology. Stroop performed the Stroop effect experiment as his dissertation, which was then actually not rediscovered until the 1960s. Stroop was more focused on religion and did not continue his research. His work continues to puzzle and affect the psychology world. Stroop’s research found that participants took longer to answer when they were presented with stimuli …show more content…
They had three experiments all similar in nature where the participants would indicate which way their hand moved, which tile was the heaviest, if the tile was vibrating and the hardness of the tile. The experimenters accomplished this by performing the experiment digitally. The first experiment the participants were holding a pen like stylus and a gentle wind would move their hand in a direction. The participants could not see their hand and were told to indicate with a click of buttons which way their hand moved. However, the experimenters would display an arrow either congruent, neutral, or incongruent to the movement of the hand. The participants were told to ignore any other stimulus and just answer the question. The errors of participants were significantly more when the arrows on the screen were incongruent. Similar results were found for the other experiments when participants were asked to judge the hardness, if vibrating, and weight of tiles. Their findings again support that when given incongruent stimulus the brain is more likely to make …show more content…
We asked the participants to say either the words or the colors presented as fast as possible but with few errors. Half of our participants were instructed to state the color of the words and the other half to say the word presented. We also used counterbalance making sure that some of the participants were shown the incongruent first and others the congruent stimuli first. The hypothesis for this experiment is that the participants will be quicker with less errors on congruent stimuli, will do moderately well on the incongruent word naming stimuli, and will do the poorest on the incongruent color naming stimuli. This is the prediction I present because reading is such an automatic response, so I think that participants will be more at ease with naming the word and it will come quicker and more naturally. Whereas with the color naming, I think that participants will be more likely to make errors and have a slower time because of the brain’s automatized answer, the word, consequently it will take the participant longer to come up with the correct answer or they will answer