Internal Assessment Stroop Effect

In psychology the Stroop Effect means the reaction time. The experiment was originally made by John Ridley Stroop in 1935. Today, records have shown that people had replicated this study 700 times. He conducted the experiment in 3 different ways: the 1st one was use the name of the colors in black ink, the 2nd was done the same way as the first one but with different color ink used, the last one was using squares with different colors. Sroop identified a large increase in the time taken by participants to complete the color reading in the second task compared to the naming of the color of the squares in experiment 2 while this delay did not appear in the first experiment. Such interference was explained by the automation of reading, where the mind automatically determines the semantic meaning of the word, and then must override this first impression with the identification of the color of the word a process that is not automatized. Unlike researchers performing the Stroop test that is most commonly used in psychological evaluation J.R Stroop never compares the time used for reading black words and the time needed for naming colors that conflicted with the written word. Stimuli in Stroop paradigms can be divided in 3 groups: neutral, congruent and incongruent. Neutral stimuli comprise those in which only the text, or color are displayed. Congruent stimuli are those in which the ink color and color name refer to the same concept. Incongruous stimuli are those in which ink color and concept differ. Three experimental findings are recurrently found in stroop experiments. A first finding is semantic interference, consisting in 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. 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 reading.