The Stroop Effect

The stroop effect is named after John Ridley Stroop. In the experiment he first did he asked people to read the written colour regardless of what the colour of the word was. In his second experiment he asked participants to say the colour of the words instead of the word and when they were shown a coloured square, they had to name the colour of the square. His third experiment just tested the same participants after they had some practice to investigate the effects of association. A difference that JR Stroop did in his experiment that is that he did not put time into account.

The results showed that people had more trouble when they tried to say the colour of the word rather than the word itself, psychologists believe that this sort of interference is caused by an area of the brain which focuses on written language, here is where the brain determines the meaning of the words. So there is a struggle between the right hemisphere and left hemisphere of the brain as one hemisphere reads the word and the other one looks at the colour.

In this experiment two theories are seen. These are Speed of Processing Theory (interference occurs because words are read faster than colors are named) and “Selective Attention Theory” (interference occurs because naming colors requires more attention than reading words)

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

http://faculty.washington.edu/chudler/words.html