The Stroop Effect

          This effect is named after John Ridley Stroop, who discovered this in 1930. It is an experiment to measure the amount of time it takes to react to different stimulates. There are 3 types of stimuli to this experiment. The first one is to write colors with black ink. In the second one, the names and the color ink used are different, and in the third one, there are squares with a given color.

Then, you are given the task of reading the colors. At first, you read the colors written in black ink. And then, with the second one, you have to read the color of the ink used to write the color, and not the word itself.

          When you do this experiment, what you will encounter is that when you try to do the second one, your brain can’t react fast enough, causing you to momentarily begin to say the word that appears instead of the color ink.

          The reason behind this strange phenomenon is that because we have been reading throughout our whole live, and sometimes, when we see the beginning of a word, we can pretty much guess the rest of it and say it, without really actually finishing reading that word. So the words themselves have more influence than the ability to name the color without processing the word, making you stumble a bit. That is called the Speed of Processing Theory. There is also another theory, Selective Attention Theory, which basically says that the interference occurs because naming colors requires more attention than reading words.