the stroop effect

The Stroop Effect

By the age of 5, most children have entered school and have begun to learn how to read. This soon becomes an automatic process so that it becomes hard NOT to read a word when presented with one. However, because this process becomes so automatic, the human mind tends to discard other aspects of the words we read. The Stroop effect is perhaps the most well known demonstration of this approach: turning an automatic mental skill into a great weakness. In particular, the skill of reading words makes it harder to perform an otherwise trivial task, like identifying the colors of those words.
Several studies have been performed to attempt to explain the phenomena identified by J.R Stroop. Hintzman, Carre, Eskridge, Owens, Shaff, and Sparks conducted one such study in 1972. They hypothesized that the Stroop effect was due to response competition between the stimulus and the ink color rather than an encoding interference. In their experiment students in an underg...