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.
John B.Watson, R Rayner, (February, 1920), Journal of Experimental Psychology, Conditioned Emotional Reactions, Vol. lll, No. i.
In 1963, Stanley Milgram conducted an experiment that was one of the most controversial of his time, and of ours. “The subjects—or ‘teachers’—were instructed to administer [electroshocks] to a human ‘learner,’ with the shocks becoming progressively more powerful and painful” (Collins, para. 1, Book Overview). The subjects watched as the “learner” was strapped into a chair. When the experimenter asked if either of the two had a question, the “learner” mentioned he had a heart problem. The “teacher” heard this, as well, and still continued to go through with the experiment. told that they were to read a series of paired words, and “learners”
The nature of the Stroop effect results as a consequence of automaticity. People have difficulty ignoring the meaning of a word because, through practice, reading has become an automatic process. The two main explanations accounting for the Stroop effect in the past have been cognitive attentional processes involved in learning, controlled and automatic. As previously mentioned, when a process is automatic (for example reading), it is not only faster; it also does not rely on other cognitive resources. Controlled processes, for example color naming, are slow and demand more attentional resources. The theory is that an automatic process cannot successfully suppressed without causing interference of a controlled process. The second explanation, relative speed of processing, argues that the two processes involved in color naming and word reading are accomplished in parallel, but that word reading is carried out faster, assuming that the faster process will then interfere with the slower ones such as color naming (Dunbar and McLeod, 1984 as cited in Mel, 1997)
Pavlov, I. P. (1927). Conditional reflexes: An investigation of the physiological activity of the cerebral cortex. Oxford, England: Oxford Univ. Press. Retrieved from www.csa.com
The participants were the twenty-seven students of Professor David Otis' Experimental Psychology class. The group of twenty-seven was split into smaller groups. We were not paid with pecuniary funds, but we did receive partial credit towards our final grade in the class.
Tremblay, S., Nicholls, A. P., Alford, D., & Jones, D. M. (2000c). The irrelevant sound effect: Does speech play a special role? Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition, 26(6), 1750-1754. doi:doi:10.1037/0278-7393.26.6.1750
Color Psychology is based on the mental and emotional effects colors have on you in life. Certain colors affect people in different ways and all people don’t get the same effect from every color. The way a certain colors psychological effect on you can come from your own personal experiences.
However, because this claim is based on subjective reports and has never been verified with objective measures, it was Rothen and Meier’s (2010) aim to test whether there really is a higher prevalence of grapheme-color synesthesia in artists. Their sample was a group of fine-art students. Participants were individually presented with 36 graphemes (A^Z; 0^9), one at a time, in random order. Each grapheme was accompanied, on the same screen, by a palette of 13 basic colors, the same each time but randomly arranged on each trial. Participants were required to select the ‘best’ color for each grapheme. After an initial presentation, an immediate surprise retest followed, in which the graphemes were presented again in a re-randomized order. The consistency score was calculated as the number of identical grapheme-color associations. In simpler terms, they showed a number on the screen then the participants picked which color suited the number best from a palette. They were then tested again in a different order and a consistency score was calculated to verify the participant had synesthesia. They found the proportion of synesthetes was significantly higher for the art students (seven synesthetes in the art students group, two in the control) (Rothen & Meier, 2010).
At the cognitive level of analysis humans are seen as behavioral entrepreneurs. Cognitive researchers have been interested in how verbal reaction is effected during interference or inhibition. According to Craig and Lockhart (1972) information is processed two ways. Shallow processing takes two forms one being structural processing (appearance), this occurs when only the physical qualities of something is encoded i.e. what the letters spell versus the color of the word. Shallow processing only involves maintenance rehearsal and leads to fairly short-term retention of information. Deep processing involves elaboration rehearsal which is a more meaningful analysis (e.g. images, thinking, associations etc.) of information and leads to better recall. It is generally easier for people to interpret the word itself which involves deep processing than to interpret the colors of the word which involves shallow processing. According to the speed of processing model word processing is much faster than color processing, thus, in a situation of interference between words and colors, when the task is to report the color, the word information arrives at the decision process stage earlier than the color information, and in result processing confusion.
This paper will present the various relationships of color and highlight the impact that color has on the memory and attention to information presentation. First we will go into the way that color has impacted normal settings and how it has impacted the world as a whole within the scope of human history for both nature and our current environment. Over the last 10 to 20 years the standards within the educational environment has put a higher demand on the higher standard of academic achievement, to which a student has to utilize their cognitive ability in an increased manner to achieve the new academic standard. These students need to have new type of strategy to achieve a more complete learning style so that they may understand, maintain attention, process, extract, and remember the lessons that they are given within a classroom or lecture environment. Colors could be just one of the elements of this memory retention system and allow the further motivation to student applications so that they can further profit from any education
Since Slater et al. were replicating Milgram’s study of obedience, their setup was also identical. The advantage of this was that the were no variances slipping into the experiment thus ensuring that the findings were solid and pure of contamination due to minor changes; The results were genuine findings into human behaviour.
Watson, J. B. (1920). Conditioned emotional reactions. The American Psychologist, 55(3), 313-317. Retrieved from http://search.proquest.com.southuniversity.libproxy.edmc.edu/
In this interesting topic of the psychology of colors, the most crucial pattern is the meaning of each color and his impact on the individual as it is represented as the following:
Weiner, I. Healy, A. Freedheim, D. Proctor,R.W., Schinka,J.A. (2003) Handbook of Psychology: Experimental psychology,18, pp 500
McClelland, J. L., & Rumelhart, D. E. (1981). An interactive activation model of context effects in letter perception: I. An account of basic findings. Psychological review, 88(5), 375.