Describe Why the Stroop Test is Challenging for Us

September 8, 2022 admin 134 Views

The Stroop effect is 1 of the best known phenomena in cognitive psychology. The Stroop effect occurs when people do the Stroop job, which is explained and demonstrated in item in this lesson. The Stroop effect is related to selective attention, which is the ability to respond to certain environmental stimuli while ignoring others.

The Stroop task

In the Stroop task, people simply wait at color words, such equally blue, red, or light-green. The interesting thing is that the task is to name the colour of the ink the words are printed in, while fully ignoring the actual word significant. It turns out that this quite hard, and you can notice out exactly how difficult this is beneath.

It is very like shooting fish in a barrel to name the colour of the discussion “black” when it is printed in black (most text is written in black ink). Information technology is also very easy to proper name the color of the give-and-take “red” printed in ruby ink color.

Information technology is hard, though, when the word and the ink color are dissimilar! This extent of this difficulty is what we call the
Stroop consequence.

Even though it was adult in the 1930s, the Stroop task is notwithstanding oftentimes used in cognitive psychological laboratories to measure out how well people can do something that clashes with their typical response pattern. This task requires a certain level of “mental command”. That is, you demand to be aware of the task you are doing now and ignore how you would normally respond to words. This requires “control” over your own default cognitive processing.

The Stroop effect

As you lot now understand, the Stroop outcome is the degree of difficulty people have with naming the color of the ink rather than the word itself. In Stroop’due south words, there is “interference” between the color of the ink and the word meaning. This interference occurs no thing how hard you lot try, which means that it is uncontrollable with the best conscious effort. It implies that at least part of our information processing occurs automatically. It happens, whether you desire it or not! Exercise you think this is truthful? If you think it is non truthful, how tin can you examination this? Could you argue that if you lot train yourself long enough, you would no longer show the Stroop effect?

In Stroop’s original study, there were three unlike experiments, and they were slightly different from the sit-in below. This is mainly for practical reasons. That is, it is easier to measure the exact time a button press takes place than to measure when people start saying a word using voice-key technology.

In pictures

In the original study by Stroop, people were shown a listing of words printed in different colors. They were asked to name the ink color, and to ignore the significant of the discussion. It turned out that people were slower and made more mistakes when there was a disharmonism betwixt the discussion meaning and the ink color (due east.k., the give-and-take “green” in red ink color).

Effigy 1. The conditions of the Stroop experiment. Condition A is “compatible”, and Condition B is “incompatible”.

Why is the effect interesting?

This effect is quite surprising. The task is surpringly more than difficult that yous would think when y’all just read about the Stroop chore. Something that is surprising is interesting, because it forces you to think:
Hey, why is this happening? It is not as easy as I had expected!

1 of the explanations for the difficulty is that we are and then used to processing word meaning while ignoring the physical features of words, that information technology is a learned response. The Stroop task requires us to do something which nosotros have never learned and which is contrary what we commonly do. MacLeod’s 1991 newspaper is still an splendid overview of nearly the Stroop task (although already more than 2 decades old).