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Revisiting the Stroop Effect: Conditions Affecting Word-Color Response

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Revisiting the Stroop Effect: Conditions Affecting Word-Color Response
Revisiting the Stroop Effect: Conditions Affecting Word-Color Response

University of California, Irvine

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Abstract

The stroop effect causes interference within people when the color of a word and a word, the name of a color, are incongruently matched. We tested this phenomenon to see if our results would be held constant as reviewed by existing literature. Our experiment used different conditions which consisted of same, different, and mixed. With these conditions we were able to see that there was a statistical significance between the associations of words and colors when they are incongruent with each other as noted through the participant’s performance.

A phenomenon known as the stroop effect is a study that has been studied extensively in the field of psychology. This is a task that most students and other participants have a hard time completing flawlessly, despite the amount of times they may practice. The effect of this phenomenon was coined by the researcher who discovered it in 1935, John Ridley Stroop (MacLeod, 1991). J.R. Stroop was concerned on the effects of interference caused by words that are incongruent with their colors. According to MacLeod, interference is expressed as the difference between the times of naming colors that are not in sync with the words being presented. Following this incongruent task, researchers Sichel and Chandler (1969) found that congruent words aided the participants in their responses by shortening the time it took them to name all colors. This shows that there are some underlying cognitive processes that inhibit our ability to respond correctly to the task. There have been findings that the type of response people take, orally or manually, also has an affect whether interference occurs in the task or not (White, 1969). The study showed that saying the words orally causes a greater interference than
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