Describe Stroop's Famous Experiment and the Stroop Effect

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Describe Stroop's Famous Experiment and the Stroop Effect

Strop Ridley wrote the article, known as the “Studies of Interference in Serial Verbal Reactions” in the year 1935. The article was based on a research that he conducted using colors to analyze the effects of interference on serial verbal reactions. The main objective of the research was establishing relationships between common changes in the environment and the reaction to these changes with respect to time (Stroop, 1935). In his study, Stroop developed a model that was meant to analyze the reaction by some students with regards to color identification and reading out words painted in different colors.

The article has details of three experiments that were carried out to realize the objectives of the study. According to the first experiment, the focus was to establish the effects of Interfering Color Stimuli upon Reading Names of Colors Serially. The experiment had 70 college students as the subjects, 14 males and 56 females. The study was meant to illustrate the stimulus effects by use of different colors. The students were expected to read out the colors of different words printed in different colors in which they represented. For example, the word blue would be printed in color red and the students asked to read out the color of the word.

The second experiment that was illustrated in the article was also aimed at identifying the effect of interfering word stimuli upon naming colors serially. In this experiment, the color of the print was the dependent variable. This meant that the students were supposed to identify with the color of the print, but not on the name that was read out (Stroop, 1935). The experiment had 100 students taking part, 88 of them being underg...

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...ction to ensure that it met the desired objectives. The experiment illustrated that the brain reacted differently to different stimuli and this showed that there are different issues that are involved in the interpretation of stimuli.

In conclusion, the experiments on the Stroops effects to stimuli are well defined to demonstrate the reaction of the brain to varying stimuli. The experiments have been used throughout the article to illustrate how the brain functions in response to interference and the students who were used demonstrated that incongruent reactions take more time to respond than the other reaction types.

Works Cited

Stroop, J. R. (1935). Studies of Interference in Serial Verbal Reactions. Journal of Experimental Psychology, 18, 643-662

Telford, C. W. (1930). Differences in responses to colors and their names. J. Genet. Psychol., 37, 151-159.

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