Stroop Essay

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Pages: 9
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I. Introduction
Can we successfully separate two opposing features of an object? This question led researchers to develop the stroop test. In this test, participants see a word printed in a different color than its semantic meaning (“yellow” printed in blue), while they are asked to report on the physical color of the word, ignoring its meaning. In the test, congruent refers to the condition where the color of the ink matches the semantic meaning of the word and incongruent refers to the condition where the color of the ink does not match the semantic meaning of the word (Braet, Noppe, Wagemans & Beek, 2010).
The experiments by Braet et al. provided evidence for what is called, the stroop effect. The stroop effect is the reaction time for the incongruent condition minus the reaction time for the congruent condition (Frings, Englert, Wentura & bermeitinger, 2010). In studies exploring the original stroop effect, tests only used colors as words (e.g. blue, red, and green). In complementary research Goldfarb & Treisman (2010), showed that with an increase in language proficiency the …show more content…
Since Stroop published the Stroop effect, his study has been replicated over 700 times (McLeod, 1991). The most popular explanation for the stroop effect came from Striling (1979), he introduced automaticity to explain the stroop effect. According to the theory of automaticity identifying colors is not an “automatic process” this causes a delayed reaction. There is however an automaticity in understanding the meaning of words caused by habitual reading. Cohen, Dunbar, and McClelland (1991), added to automaticity their theory of parallel distributed processing. Cohen et al. suggest that different pathways in the brain have different strengths; in the stroop effect the pathways word reading and color naming are activated, when the word reading pathways is stronger that the color naming pathway the stroop effect will
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