The Stroop Effect

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The Effects of the Stroop Test On College Students
Julina R. Nocera
University of Massachusetts, Amherst

Abstract

In our replication of the Stroop Task, I aimed to investigate J.R. Stroop’s “Stroop Effect” among a different population—college students. We were aiming to see if the effects of incongruent labels superimposed on a drawing were uniform across different age groups. The Stroop Task measures the level of interference of written words on tasks that involve naming something, and our experiment examines this process of encoding stimuli. We found that the results are consistent and automaticity, the tendency for our brains to automatically encode and interpret a certain stimuli, occurs with written …show more content…
The Stroop task was developed to investigate the operations of cognition and to better understand the processes of attention (MacLeod 1991). This effect suggests that humans have the tendency to automatically process written stimuli. The Stroop Task involved a color stimulus as well as a word stimulus that was presented to the participant at the same time (Stroop 1935, p. 659). In Stroop’s original experiment he presented words that indicated color (i.e. red, blue, yellow, etc.) under two conditions, congruent ink color and incongruent ink colors (Stroop 1935). This study proved the “Stroop Effect” or the tendency for it to be easier for one to identify pictures in a timely manner when there is not incongruence associated with it, in this case a different ink color (Ehri …show more content…
503). The processing time of these drawings were tested by measuring the time it took for the subject to tell the researcher the name of the drawing. The results were consistent with the Stroop Effect phenomenon, in that the incongruently labeled pictures required more processing time than the pictures that did not have any label at all. The following replication of this study is designed to determine if the results are consistent across different populations. We chose to experiment with participants who were college aged rather than junior high or elementary school children. If the results of the Stroop effect are consistent with previous research, then the college-aged students should display the tendency to take longer to identify pictures with incongruent words, because of the tendency to automatically process written
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