Automaticity and the Stroop Effect
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Some Activities Don’t Require Your Brain!
Have you ever been in the car driving, and all of a sudden you’re at your destination, unaware of how you even got there? Or while reading a book you have no idea of what you just read halfway down the page? If so, then you may have experienced the amazing phenomenon of automaticity! Automaticity is the ability to do certain activities with minimal cognitive effort. It emerges from habit, meaning that activities are only automated if they are done repeatedly over a certain stretch of time. Driving is a one of the most popular and experienced examples. Driving for most people is completely automated because the event occurs so frequently. Your brain has undergone the work required for you to learn how to drive, and once its functions were completed, it no longer needed to keep reminding you how to drive. Another example is basic math. One does not have to cognitively think about one plus one equaling two: it is a natural and automotive process.
One of the major studies conducted that gives results to this phenomenon is called The Stroop Effect. What’s interesting about this sensation is that it is virtually impossible to interfere with its processes. The Stroop Effect was conducted under the watch of J. Ridley Stroop in 1935, and is still widely used as a means of understanding the process of automaticity. An example of the Stroop Effect is located in the picture to the left. He observed that people who are given a word list that is in a different color, find it extremely difficult to name the color of the actual ink, regardless of what the word says. However, when they were asked to read the word, they had no problems of recall, even if the word was in a different color. The graph below shoes the results from the original Stroop Effect experiment conducted in 1935.
As you can see, the reaction time for word recall is much smaller than that for color recall. This shows evidence that
Some Activities Don’t Require Your Brain!
Have you ever been in the car driving, and all of a sudden you’re at your destination, unaware of how you even got there? Or while reading a book you have no idea of what you just read halfway down the page? If so, then you may have experienced the amazing phenomenon of automaticity! Automaticity is the ability to do certain activities with minimal cognitive effort. It emerges from habit, meaning that activities are only automated if they are done repeatedly over a certain stretch of time. Driving is a one of the most popular and experienced examples. Driving for most people is completely automated because the event occurs so frequently. Your brain has undergone the work required for you to learn how to drive, and once its functions were completed, it no longer needed to keep reminding you how to drive. Another example is basic math. One does not have to cognitively think about one plus one equaling two: it is a natural and automotive process.
One of the major studies conducted that gives results to this phenomenon is called The Stroop Effect. What’s interesting about this sensation is that it is virtually impossible to interfere with its processes. The Stroop Effect was conducted under the watch of J. Ridley Stroop in 1935, and is still widely used as a means of understanding the process of automaticity. An example of the Stroop Effect is located in the picture to the left. He observed that people who are given a word list that is in a different color, find it extremely difficult to name the color of the actual ink, regardless of what the word says. However, when they were asked to read the word, they had no problems of recall, even if the word was in a different color. The graph below shoes the results from the original Stroop Effect experiment conducted in 1935.
As you can see, the reaction time for word recall is much smaller than that for color recall. This shows evidence that