An Experiment Into the Stroop Effect
Abstract
The aim of my research was to study automatic processes by replicating the previously carried out Stroop effect. The participants, 20
Richmond College students (10 boys and 10 girls) chosen by an opportunistic sample were taken into a quiet room separately, were presented with 6 lists of words, out of which 3 were congruent and the other 3 incongruent and the time taken for each participant to name the colour that the words were written in was measured and recorded.
From this repeated measures design, the results were that participants took a considerably longer to name the colour in the incongruent words than the congruent words. This corresponded to earlier research carried out by Stroop and the results were highly significant to a 5% significance level and a critical value of 60. In conclusion, it can be said that the powerfully autonomic nature of reading words, as it is such a well-learned automatic activity does interfere with other tasks. Introduction
------------
Attention is a system, which allows us to select and process certain significant incoming information. Selective attention refers to the ability to focus on one task at a time whilst excluding any eternal stimuli, which may be distracting. Whereas divided attention refers to the ability to divide ones attention between two or more tasks. If one of these tasks becomes an automatic process it becomes easier to divide ones attention between these two tasks.
However, sometimes rather than being helpful, interference can occur between the controlled process and the automatic process.
Psychologists have frequently found that the powerfully autonomic nature of reading words, as it is such a well-learned automatic activity can interfere with other tasks. This idea has been researched by a number of researchers.
Kanheman (1973) devised a model of divided attention, which was based around the idea of mental effort. He proposed
The aim of my research was to study automatic processes by replicating the previously carried out Stroop effect. The participants, 20
Richmond College students (10 boys and 10 girls) chosen by an opportunistic sample were taken into a quiet room separately, were presented with 6 lists of words, out of which 3 were congruent and the other 3 incongruent and the time taken for each participant to name the colour that the words were written in was measured and recorded.
From this repeated measures design, the results were that participants took a considerably longer to name the colour in the incongruent words than the congruent words. This corresponded to earlier research carried out by Stroop and the results were highly significant to a 5% significance level and a critical value of 60. In conclusion, it can be said that the powerfully autonomic nature of reading words, as it is such a well-learned automatic activity does interfere with other tasks. Introduction
------------
Attention is a system, which allows us to select and process certain significant incoming information. Selective attention refers to the ability to focus on one task at a time whilst excluding any eternal stimuli, which may be distracting. Whereas divided attention refers to the ability to divide ones attention between two or more tasks. If one of these tasks becomes an automatic process it becomes easier to divide ones attention between these two tasks.
However, sometimes rather than being helpful, interference can occur between the controlled process and the automatic process.
Psychologists have frequently found that the powerfully autonomic nature of reading words, as it is such a well-learned automatic activity can interfere with other tasks. This idea has been researched by a number of researchers.
Kanheman (1973) devised a model of divided attention, which was based around the idea of mental effort. He proposed
References: 1. Cardwell, Clark and Melldrum, Collins psychology for A2 level 2. David Rice and Mike Haralambos, psychology in focus A2 level