The Stroop Effect is one of the most-studied phenomena in psychology. This effect shows how the brain deals with conflicting interference. The test is easy to administer, and works in a variety of contexts. This experiment was first conducted in 1935 by J. Ridley Stroop and was first noted in the Journal of Experimental Psychology
The procedure of this study is that the words will be printed in 3 forms, one all in black ink, then another one in colored ink correspondent to the color the words spell and the last also in color ink but not representing the word spelled. Then to present these words to a certain number of subjects and measure the time they take to finish reading each form. Objective of this experiment is to see how fast is the human reaction time to something that is considered to be a really fast reaction that is barely processed through the brain. This means that when we see the partial beginning of the word, our brains already forms the shape of the word and says it, but the point of this is not to read the words, but the color of the ink of the word. The word themselves has more influence over the mind than the colors. This is due to certain cognitive processes seem automatic in the sense that they do not require effortful thought or seem beyond our conscious control. There is also the consideration of the way you show the words. What if you put colored ink to nonsense words? Would you still have trouble saying them? Probably not. So in order to have a conflicting stimuli for the brain, we right the words of the colors instead of nonsense words.
There are a couple of reasons behind this. There is one that states that the interference is caused by only one area of the brain is dominating the response of other functional areas. One is the Speed of Processing Theory: the interference occurs because words are read faster than colors are named. The other one is Selective Attention Theory: the interference occurs because naming colors requires more attention than reading words. Another way to explain this is that words are read faster than colors are named, two responses compete to be the actual response produced (this causes the interference), similar to a race to see which will come out first (reading words will always come out first).
