The two main theories behind the Stroop effect are the speed of processing theory and the selective attention theory. Other theories include the automaticity hypothesis, bottleneck theory and parallel distributed processing theory. The Stroop effect is the interference in the brain when it receives conflicting information.
The Stroop effect was discovered by the American psychologist John Riddley Stroop in 1935. Stroop merged the 2 stimulus dimensions of word and object (color) into a single whole, creating a comic response conflict scenario. Word recognition and font color recognition are 2 different cognitive processes.
The Stroop effect refers to a delay in reaction times between congruent and incongruent stimuli (MacLeod, 1991). The congruency, or agreement, occurs when the meaning of a word and its font color are the same. For example, if the word “green” is printed in the color green. Incongruent stimuli is just the opposite.
Stroop’s innovation was to show, clearly and definitively, that our embedded knowledge about our environment impacts how we interact with it. His research method is now one of the most famous and well-known examples of a psychological test, and is elegant in its simplicity.
What this reveals is that the brain can’t help but read. As habitual readers, we encounter and comprehend words on such a persistent basis that the reading occurs almost effortlessly, whereas declaration of a color requires more cognitive effort.
Using this paradigm, we can assess an individual’s cognitive processing speed, their attentional capacity, and their level of cognitive control (otherwise known as their executive function).
The Stroop test can be simply administered with a basic experimental setup. At its most fundamental, all you need is an image of the Stroop test words, a stopwatch, and someone to record the time and answers (and a willing participant!). However, if you want to gain more insights from the data, there are plenty of ways to take the test further.
Finally, we can see how this test is implemented in iMotions using the Qualtrics survey function. This is easily implemented, and appears in a similar way to the above surveys that are built by iMotions. One of the advantages of using Qualtrics is that feedback to participant answers can be immediately provided, should this be desired.
The Stroop test is a widely-used, well established methodology that reveals various brain functions, and implicit cognitive workings. The original article has now been cited over 13,000 times and that number will surely continue to rise well into the future.
The Stroop effect (reaction . time) is greater when the color of the ink does not match the name of the color than when . the color of the ink matches the name of the color. Glucose is a carbohydrate, and is an extremely important sugar in human metabolism.
The purpose of experiment one was to test the effects of drink consumed (glucose, . artificial sweetener, or water) and stimuli (food or non-food) on cognitive conflict. Glucose has been known to better cognitive functioning, and preoccupation with food . worsens cognitive functioning on a food-related task.
may be due to the fact that artificial sweeteners do not activate the food reward pathways . in the same fashion as natural sweeteners, and lack of caloric contribution usually . eliminates the post-ingestive component of the food reward branches, which depends on . metabolic products of the food.
of the brain focused on higher-level thinking. By using a logical reasoning test and a . Stroop test, researchers found that low glucose levels resulted in rigid thinking and higher . glucose levels resulted in higher-level thinking (Donohoe & Benton, 1999).