Stroop Effect Lab Report

The effect is named after John Ridley Stroop, who published the effect in English in 1935 in an article entitled Studies of interference in serial verbal reactions that includes three different experiments.[1] However, the effect was first published in 1929 in German, and its roots can be followed back to works of James McKeen Cattell and Wilhelm Wundt in the nineteenth century.[2][3][4]

In his experiments, J. R. Stroop administered several variations of the same test for which three different kinds of stimuli were created. In the first one, names of colors appeared in black ink. In the second, names of colors appeared in a different ink than the color named. Finally in the third one, there were squares of a given color.[1]

In the first
Neutral stimuli comprise those in which only the text (similarly to stimuli 1 of Stroop's experiment), or color (similarly to stimuli 3 of Stroop's experiment) are displayed.[6] Congruent stimuli are those in which the ink color and color name refer to the same concept (for example the "red" word written in red). Incongruent stimuli are those in which ink color and concept differ.[6] Three experimental findings are recurrently found in stroop experiments.[6] A first finding is semantic interference, consisting of the fact that naming the ink of neutral stimuli is faster than in incongruent conditions. It is called semantic interference since it is usually accepted that the relationship in meaning between ink color and word is at the origin of the interference.[6] Semantic facilitation defines the finding that naming the ink of congruent stimuli is faster than with neutral stimuli. The third finding is that both semantic interference and facilitation disappear when the task consists in reading the word instead of naming the ink. It has been sometimes called Stroop asyncrony, and has been explained by a reduced automaticitation when naming colors compared to