Stroop Effect Essay

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This essay is Regarding research methods one in psychology. The Stroop Effect in essence is name a color word written on an opposing color. Comparison of Reaction Times for the Stroop Colour Word Task Catherine Gorman Edith Cowan University Joondalup WA Abstract The Stroop colour word task has fascinated psychologists for many years, ever since JR Stroop discovered the phenomenon in 1935, showing interference between conflicting cognitive processes relating to attention. This experiment was designed to examine the Stroop colour word task, to ascertain that it takes longer to say the incongruent colour word (naming the colour, not the written word itself) as opposed to the nonsense colour word. Eight participants volunteered to participate in this experiment. Participants were handed two sheets of paper for the purpose of reading them individually and were timed for each individual sheet. The participants were instructed to read the sheets as expeditiously and accurately as possible, ignoring the written word, naming the colour and correct any errors made during the process. The contrast in time for reading the two sheets was recorded to show the level of interference between them. The results suggest that participants took shorter time to read the nonsense words than that of reading the incongruent words. These findings maintain the hypothesis for the Stroop colour word task. Comparison of Reaction Times for the Stroop Colour Word Task The Stroop effect was discovered by John Ridley Stroop (1935), involving cognitive interference in colour-word processing tasks and continues to captivate experimenting in psychology to this day. Cattell in 1886 was doing his own dissertation under Whundt, and this influenced Stroop's research some 50 years earlier by reporting

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