The Stroop Effect
In his historic study, Stroop found that reading names of colors interfered with individuals’ ability to name the ink color the word was printed in when the two differed (i.e., the word “BLUE” written in red ink) (1935). However, the basis of this phenomenon can be traced back to Cattell who found that naming colors and pictures took twice as long to accomplish than reading the word these colors or pictures represented (1886). He concluded that this was due to reading being an automatic process while identifying colors or pictures requires a conscious effort (Cattell, 1886). MacLeod (1991) reflects that it was Cattell’s work which strongly influenced future psychologist including Stroop.
In his experiment, Stroop investigated how the reaction time to name colors increased when it conflicted with the automatic process of reading. He broke down his experiment into three parts. In the first, he tested how reading the name of a color printed in a different ink color (i.e., BLUE) differed from reading the name of a color printed in black ink (i.e., BLUE). The difference between the name of the color and the ink color it was printed in caused a slight interference resulting in an increased reaction time of 2.3 seconds (Stroop, 1935).
In the second part of his experiment, Stroop (1935) looked at reaction time differences between naming the color of solid blocks (i.e., ■ ■ ■ ■ ■) versus naming the color of the ink not the name of the color (i.e., responding “RED” for BLUE). He found that participants required 74% more time to name the color of the ink when it did not agree with the name of the color (Stroop, 1935). Stroop concluded that it was the interference between the automatic process of reading the na...
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Due to its key in understanding attention, the study that lead to many other related investigations, originated by examining interference in reading automaticity. Stroop furthered his research by creating tasks involving color naming and reading. He first compared the time it took to read color names printed in incongruent ink colors to a base line reading of color words. For the second part of his study, Stroop compared the time it took to name the ink color when congruent with the color word (e.g., blue printed in blue ink) to the time it took to name the ink color.
The Rorschach was named after a Swiss psychiatrist named Hermann Rorschach. He was born in 1884 in Zurich and died in 1922 due to complications with appendicitis. He was the original developer of the inkblots, but he did not use them for personality analysis like they are used today. Throughout his lifetime, Hermann took a deep interest in psychoanalysis, and during the early 1900’s he published several psychoanalytic articles. It was just in 1911 that he had begun experimenting with the interpretation of ink blots as a mean of determining introversion and extroversion. Although some people would think he was the first to do so, Rorschach was not the first one to study ink blots; among his famous forerunners of the inkblots are Leonardo da Vinci and Jusinus Kerner.
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Most of the population doesn’t get a certain taste in their mouth when we hear a certain music note and we don’t see certain letters in colors. But for people with forms of synaesthesia, they experience many of these mixing of senses. Typically synaesthesia starts in early childhood and is consistent as the person ages. It is known that the experiences occur with no conscious effort. There are two common forms of synaesthesia, color–graphemic synaesthesia, where specific numbers and letters or words, written and/or spoken, provoking a reaction to seeing different colors. And the second being, color–phonemic synaesthesia, the spoken form. There are reports that state that there are many types of inducers (the stimulus that triggers the synaesthetic experience) and concurrent (the synaesthetic experience itself).
One hundred and forty two undergraduate students participated in a levels-of-processing experiment on the basis of Craik & Tulving’s (1975) famous model. Participants were presented with shallow, intermediate or semantic words within 60 judgment trials, followed by a recognition test of 120 trials containing half of the original words. The findings suggest that participants recognized the semantic words better compared to the shallow and intermediate words; this proposes that by the use of attention, semantic processing leads to a stronger memory trace. Possible explanations and future research regarding levels of processing are discussed.
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This demonstrated in an experiment by John Ridley Stroop (1935) where he investigated the how well student participants were able to state the color of the word rather than reading the word itself. The researcher predicted that naming the color of the word takes longer and is more prone to errors than when the color of the ink matches the name of the color. In the experiment participants were given a ten word sample before the first reading of each test. At the beginning of each test t...
Although there was some criticisms about the above experiment, Craik and Tulving performed more experiments each time refining the D.O.P. model. There were thoughts that the structural tasks were easier and not as much time had to be spent on them therefore people did not have as long to look at those words and could not study them like the other tasks. Craik and Tulving then made the structural task take equally as long as the other tasks. The results remand the same as the previous experiments. Craik and Tulving also originally started with five tasks, but then narrowed it down to three to avoid a ceiling effect. The self-referent task was later added to model by Rogers.
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Jules Davidoff, Ian Davies, and Debi Roberson conducted a study in 2000 that replicated older research studies. Through replication of these studies, they discovered support of how language affects color categorization, perception, and recognition. Davidoff, Davies, and Roberson (2000) point out that the data they collected from their experiments support the idea of a relationship between using color terminology and categorization. Moreover, their research has backed up the conception of everyone sharing the method of using different color categories to understand the concept of color. We do not only divide color in similar ways since birth, and there are some aspects of nurture involved through the particular language (or in some case, languages) we end up learning that influence where we dr...
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For the first experiment, two groups of participants were either randomly assigned to a cubicle with a diffused cleaner scent present, or to a control group where no diffused scent was present. Participants were then asked whether a string of letters appearing on a computer screen contained any real words by pressing either a "yes" or "no" button. Words were either cleaning related such as "cleaning" and "hygiene," or were control words such as "table"...
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