Stroop Effect

 Got Brains, eh??

I know you guys must have given this test many times.. but still try!! :P

Now, name the COLOR (not what the word says!)

Well.. having done that, read below!!

In psychology, the Stroop effect (the test you gave above!) is a demonstration of the reaction time of a 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.

The words themselves have a strong influence over your ability to say the color. The interference between the different information (what the words say and the color of the words) your brain receives causes a problem. There are two theories that may explain the Stroop effect:

1. Speed of Processing Theory: the interference occurs because words are read faster than colors are named.
2. Selective Attention Theory: the interference occurs because naming colors requires more attention than reading words.

For a number of years, the Stroop Effect has been helpful in testing people with mental disorders like Schizophrenia and different Phobia Disorders. For instance, Schizophrenia is a psychological disorder characterized by severely disordered thoughts and therefore patients have a very difficult time controlling their attention. Once on medications, a psychiatrist can use the Stroop Task to evaluate their patient's progress and see if his or her attention improves. Also, the Emotional Stroop Task was created, which instructs people to name the ink colors of printed words like "hairy" or "slither". It has been found that people with various phobias are much slower when working with anxiety related words.
The Stroop Effect has played a large and significant role in individual’s lives as a whole, not just in the eye of psychology. The Stroop Effect has been tested and vigorously researched for years and yet it continues to prevail as a huge contributor in the complex world that is cognitive psychology.

John Ridley Stroop first reported this effect in his Ph.D. thesis published in 1935, commonly known as "Stroop Effect":

• When the meaning of a word and its color are congruent, such as the word "BLUE" written in blue color, it is easy to recognize the actual color of the word.
• But when the meaning of the word is incongruent with the color, such as "BLUE" written in red color, it creates a conflict between the color and the word's meaning.
• The "conflict" between two brain processes are word-recognition and color-recognition.
• This conflict requires extra processing time for the brain to resolve.
• It turns out that we are so fluent in our language that word-recognition is slightly faster/stronger than color-recognition.
• Most people will recognize the meaning of the word before recognizing the color.
• In order to name the color correctly, the two processes compete for the final decision-making process.
• The brain has to inhibit the faster/stronger word-recognition process in order to allow the color-recognition to win in the final response.
• This inhibition requires "selective attention" (attentional focus) to inhibit the competing conflicting process.
• The reaction time is an indicator of the "attentional process" in the brain – it increases with attentional fatigue and/or inattentiveness.
• The error in recognizing the correct color when a conflict is present is associated with the "impulsivity" that the brain is unable to suppress.
• Thus, Stroop Effect is widely used to indicate mental process of attentional fatigue and/or the decreased ability to inhibit ongoing competing conflicts often associated with ADHD (Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder).
• ADHD subjects often take much longer time than normal subjects to resolve the conflicts and make more errors due to the insufficient inhibition in the brain circuitry to suppress the ongoing competing processes.