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Testing of the Stroop Effect in Colour-Associated Words and Neutral Words

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Testing of the Stroop Effect in Colour-Associated Words and Neutral Words
Testing of the Stroop effect in colour-associated words and neutral words

Abstract

Study examined the Stroop effect in words which are not colours, but represent related object connected to certain colours and whether that would yield similar or the same effect as the classic Stroop study. Previous studies such as Stroop's (1935) found out a clash between controlled and automatic processing, which resulted in delayed answering. This experiment was conducted for 20 participants of both sexes and various age categories. They were given two lists consisting each of 30 coloured words. One half of these words were colour-neutral and other colour-relevant. As was expected, the colour-neutral were processed much faster. It is therefore obvious that two-processes are operating simultaneously and when they are triggered at same time towards the same goal they interfere.

Introduction

Why is that we cannot perceive everything what is within the range of our senses? Is it because our capacity is not up to the job or is it because our conscious mind would drift us straight into insanity ? There is no straightforward answer to that. However, it is known that the attention itself is not only the conscious one, but also as it seem sub-conscious one, which is responsible for the automatic interactions with the environment. There is no need to concentrate on breathing or reading at the stage of an healthy adult person. But once those processes were new and there was a time when they were fully conscious. This experiment zooms in on the clash between controlled and automatic attention processing.

Automatic processing as it seem is necessary to supplement the inability of human mind to attend everything what is happening around. Kahneman (1973) speaks about a limitation of a processor within the brain, which is responsible for analysing incoming data and integrating them with already memorised material. In order to explore the interaction between controlled and

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