Selective Attention Theory: The Stroop Effect

Yesenia Kinsey
Kendra
8th Grade Science
May 16, 2016
The Stroop Effect

The brain´s time to react slows down when having to deal with other conflicting information. To see how this phenomenon works, I'm going to see how fast the brain can react before being interfered with new information, versus after being interfered.
After doing some research, I´ve came up with a hypothesis that states, if I ask a person to say the color of a word, let's say ¨blue¨ that is printed in blue, and then show the same person a word, ¨red¨ printed in blue, they will say the word instead of the color of the word. I chose this topic because it seems that some elements are stronger than others. And in this case, words seem to have a stronger influence over the ability
(4)

That is the essence of the Stroop effect, which was discovered in the 1930’s by John Ridley Stroop as part of his doctoral thesis in psychology at George Peabody College for Teachers, which is now part of Vanderbilt. The discovery, which was published in 1935, has become a classic taught introductory psychology courses in universities around the world. Even more importantly it is finding an ever widening circle of research and clinical applications. (5)

The growing use of Stroop’s discovery is finding widespread clinical application as well. “It’s not just an intellectual curiosity that keeps academics occupied,” added Colin MacLeod from the University of Toronto at Scarborough who has been using the effect to explore aspects of attention, memory and “automaticity” for the last 20 years. Because the effect only shows up in fluent readers, a picture version is being used to diagnose children with learning disabilities. In clinical psychology it is being used to identify phobias: If Joe is afraid of spiders, it takes him longer to identify the color that associated words such as “web” or “crawly” are printed. It is also used to diagnose individuals with schizophrenia and attention deficit disorder. In many drug trials it is used as a general test to determine if the ingredients have any effect on people’s cognitive abilities.
My hypothesis says that if I ask a person to say the color of a word and then ask the same person to say the different color of the same word, they will say the word instead of the color of the word. By performing this experiment, I will learn how the brain reacts when being interfered with different tasks (multi- tasking), and I hope to use this information to advance my research.
Works Cited
Laura Gray. ¨The Stroop Effect in Psychology¨ 2003-2016. http://study.com/academy/lesson/the-stroop-effect-in-psychology-definition-test-experiment.html ¨Background on the Stroop Effect¨ https://www.rit.edu/cla/gssp400/sbackground.html ¨What is the Stroop Effect?¨ 2003-2016 http://www.wisegeek.org/what-is-the-stroop-effect.htm Eric H Chudler. “Colors, Colors” 1996-2015 https://faculty.washington.edu/chudler/words.html 5. David F Salisbury. “Stroop effect helps put Vanderbilt on psychology map” October 2, 2002.