The Stroop effect was first introduced by J. Ridley Stroop in 1935. J. Stroop introduced this phenomena, the Stroop effect, in order to use this as a tool to study cognitive control. Cognitive control is how we humans go through a psychological process in which we plan, coordinate and execute actions in an attempt to complete the given goals. Cognitive control is affected by the attention processes; attention processes is the concept that is responsible in determining the selective task-relevant information and ignoring the task-irrelevant information when completing a task. For example, during a test you are presented with questions in the multiple-choice format. You have four possible choices to choose from and only one choice is correct. …show more content…
In J. Stroop's lab report he states that "the time for reading names of colors had been compared with the time for naming colors themselves. This suggested a comparison of the interfering effect of color stimuli upon reading names of colors with the interfering effect of word stimuli upon naming the colors themselves" (pg. 2-3). The amount of time it takes to recognize the colors and naming the colors will determine how strong or weak the Stroop effect is. The basic features of a Stroop experiment are composed of two concepts, which are congruency and task. Congruency has two subunits in it which are known as congruent (words matching the color) and incongruent (words not matching the color at all). Task are the specific steps one has to complete to reach the goal. In this experiment the subjects have to name the word or either name the color of the word. At the end you will be measuring how fast the subjects react to the congruent items as compared to the incongruent …show more content…
The model that will be the focus for this paper is called the Horse-Race model, in other words the relative speed of processing. According to Macleod this model "begins with the fact that words are read faster than colors are named" (pg. 187). It is well known that people can make responses faster to word information alone than to color information alone. Another aspect of the Horse-Race model is the notion of automaticity, which is the concept that some kinds of information are processed, rapidly, effortlessly, and without voluntary control. When you look at words, your brain processes the words even when you do not want it to. Regardless of whether words are processed in a truly automatic fashion, it is clear that different kinds of information are processed at different rates. The fact that different stimuli have different processing rates is the big idea behind the Horse-Race model of Stroop. The purpose of this experiment is to test the predictions made by the Horse-Race model and determine if the predictions are valid. The specific aim of the experiment is to further test the Horse-Race model of the Stroop effect. We want to determine specifically if words are read faster than colors are named. The two independent variables that will be manipulated are congruency (congruent vs. incongruent) and task (name color vs. name word). The model predicts that the main effect
William James, an American psychologist, proposed the first theory of what we now call “selective attention”. Selective attention is the assumption that in order to focus on one activity going on in your environment, you must hinder all other tasks occurring in the background. A good illustration of this would be to block out the music playing for the sake of progress on school work. This is referred to as the spotlight theory. In premise, your visual attention works like a spotlight. There is a focal point, or place or concentration. Beyond the focal point is considered to be fringe; seen by the viewer, but not observed clearly. Outside of the focal point and fringe is surplus and not viewed at all (Cherry, 2014).
However, thanks to in depth pursuit of this topic by scientists, especially Ramachandran and Hubbard the validity of such statements has been proven. One test they developed to test the ability of people to pair colors with the site of ordinary numbers involved printing up sheets with similar numbers, like 2 and 5. Many people claimed to see a certain color when presented with the number 2 and a different color when shown 5.
...We also saw that memory can play an important role too, but this is not yet clearly demonstrated. Moreover some studies reveal that the congruency (vs. incongruence) of the critical stimulus can also play an important role in awareness, a phenomenon called cocktail party effect. Such phenomenon makes clear that the relevance of the stimuli plays a key role in awareness and perception. The cocktail party effect is the phenomenon of being able to focus one's auditory attention on a particular stimulus while filtering out a range of other stimuli, much the same way that one can focus on a single conversation in a noisy room and yet be able to hear if someone calls out his name or other relevant stimuli (danger words for example). Still, sometimes we fail to perceive something that is happening right in front of us. It is easy to miss something you’re not looking for.
...ce for increased activity in visual areas or the fusiform gyrus, which is connected with color perception. These results have shown that spoken words result in co-activation of color processing areas, but not visual areas connected with the perceptual process of color. Sadly, the conclusions don’t reveal which perceptual or cognitive processes might cause the difference with people with synaesthesia and the controls.
...dering had an impact on performance while reading aloud and during a version of the Stroop task. During both experiments the researchers found mind wandering rates to be high and negatively associated with inaccurate responses across both conditions. In Stroop trials the researchers observed the slowest response times and highest error rates with incongruent trials (read word ‘red’ in green ink), however this was also the condition with the lowest amount of reported mind wandering. Increased mind wandering rates also forecasted slower reaction times; the findings suggest that processes associated with reading may correspond to those related to mind wandering.
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Macleod and Mathews (1991) induced attentional biases within a laboratory setting to determine that a ca...
In this experiment we replicated a study done by Bransford and Johnson (1972). They conducted research on memory using schemas. All human beings possess categorical rules or scripts that they use to interpret the world. New information is processed according to how it fits into these rules, called schemas. Bransford and Johnson did research on memory for text passages that had been well comprehended or poorly comprehended. Their major finding was that memory was superior for passages that were made easy to comprehend. For our experiment we used two different groups of students. We gave them different titles and read them a passage with the intentions of finding out how many ideas they were able to recall. Since our first experiment found no significant difference, we conducted a second experiment except this time we gave the title either before or after the passage was read. We found no significant difference between the title types, but we did find a significant difference between before and after. We also found a significant title type x presentation interaction. We then performed a third experiment involving showing objects before and after the passage was read. There we did encountersome significant findings. The importance and lack of findings is discussed and we also discuss suggestions for future studies, and how to improve our results.
Group A consisted of two females, one eighteen years of age and the other nineteen, and two males, one eighteen years of age and the other nineteen. Group B consisted of the remaining participants. Both groups saw the entire list words for ten minutes before the screen was turned off. During this time, Group B chewed on spearmint gum while Group A was not exposed to the stimulus. Both groups were then given a 1-minute break prior to the test. When the minute was up, they wrote the words they still remembered onto a piece of paper. A total of five minutes was given to recall the words. During this time, Group B chewed on spearmint gum and Group A was not exposed the stimulus. Both groups then had their results analyzed to determine which group was able to recall more words.
In one condition the participant had three cards placed in front of them and they had to switch between three card sorting rules just like in the original paper version of the WCST. In another condition they started to increase the amount of information that had to be processed by adding another card to the set which is called a fourth viable task. The first study was conducted with twenty-five undergrad students that didn’t have any history of neurological and psychiatric disabilities they were grouped by the age range of 18 to 33 every participant had normal or corrected to normal vision. They sat about a foot and a half away from the monitor, then the professors placed about 24 stimulus cards on that varied in color, shape, number, and shading (filled, empty, dotted, hatched). The use of so many different cards is necessary for a sensitive scoring of error scores, it allows determining which rule has been chosen by the examinee. “The number of viable task rules was varied as the central manipulation of this study. In the three-rule condition, one of the four rules was inactive for the participant (i.e., the participant was told that there were only three viable task rules and responses to the fourth rule never resulted in positive feedback).” (Lange
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Khaneman (1973) devised model of attention as he believed a limited amount of attention is allocated to tasks by a central processor. Many factors determine how much attentional capacity can be allocated and how much is needed to carry out a task, as the central processor has variable but limited capacity which is dependent on motivation and arousal. The central processor engages a variety of tasks such as motor, visual, auditory, memory and so on. The central processor evaluates the amount of concentration necessary to meet task demands, which forms the basis of allocation of capacity.
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.