The Stroop Effect

In these few months, I did an experiment in the University of Sydney to investigate to what extent do human attention to object and reaction speed be affected by a distractor sudden onset. I decided six conditions for this experiments and each condition had different level of the rate of “sudden onset” appearance. What is attention? “Attention is a concept studied in cognitive psychology that refers to how we actively process specific information present in our environment.” Think about our everyday life, a highlighter is always being used to mark the important elements in our notes so that when we do the review, our attention may easily be attract by the highlighted area. However, if we assume that there are some elements which are not important

In Stroop task, When the name of a color (e.g., "blue", "green", or "red") is printed in a color not denoted by the name (e.g., the word "red" printed in blue ink instead of red ink), 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. The effect is named after John Ridley Stroop, who first published the effect in English in 1935. My experiment is similar to this famous psychology research in some aspects. Both our aims are researching on how human reaction time is affected by confounding factors, and the theory would be the human brain's ability to recognize the information we receive. However, there were some differences which were Stroop task was more focus on the processing speed of our brain on reading text and reading color, but in my experiment, it more focus on how attention is affected by “sudden onset” therefore changes on the processing speed of our

When we under sudden onset condition, the reaction time for us to press the correct button for the target is longer than under a baseline condition in all six conditions. However, in conditions 2,4,5,6 which p-value is less than 0.05 which means they have strong evidence to against the null hypothesis. In conditions 1 and 3, the p-value is much higher than 0.05, the reason would be the differences between two reaction time were small because the sudden onset is not significant enough for interference participants’ attention and the is arrow acts like a “highlighter” to help participant to more focus on the correct target.

Furthermore, in Stroop task, when participants were asked to read out the word’s color with unmatched color words, the mistakes happened more offend, which means our attention was dispersed indeed, and the unmatched color words interference our brain to process the correct word’s color presented in wrong reading. Hence, our attention is limited and selective so it will be affected by a distractor sudden onset