‘Testing the competence of the Stroop test when taken by undergraduate students with pairs of words and colours that are congruous, incongruous and semantic.’
ABSTRACT
This experiment was conducted using a semantic variation in addition to the original Stroop test to determine the difference in reaction times when applied to congruent, incongruent and semantic words and colours. The experiment was conducted with a sample of 20 (17 female, 3 male) junior freshman psychology students (Mean age = 19.47 Age Range = 17- 24), sampled by convenience in a within- group format. The experiment was conducted in a mandatory lab so there were no rewards offered. In order to counterbalance the results, the computer program ‘Superlab …show more content…
Throughout further testing, the general context of the words began to interest experimenters. In Stroop’s original experiment, the control was a congruous word (a word corresponding to its colour). The flaw in this however could have been that participants copped on that the colours matched the words and thus just read off the words rather than interpreting the …show more content…
It has shown to be applicable to non-words that sound like colours (e.g. bloo) as well as being immune to practice. In 1975, Gillian Cohen and Maryanne Martin even conducted an auditory stroop test with high and low frequencies. 3 Throughout further investigations into the test, psychologists came up with the idea that the context of the word could play a significant role in reaction time. In 1971, Meyer and Schvaneveldt conducted an experiment in which secondary school students were asked to identify whether strings of letters made up words or not. In each trial, the student was presented with a pair of strings of letters. It was found that if the pairs were commonly associated (e.g. F-L-O-W-E-R and R-O-S-E), the response time was a lot swifter than if they were incongruent (e.g. T-I-R-E and