Why is it hard to name the ink color of the wrong color word?
A word can be easy to read and awkward to ignore. When its meaning conflicts with its ink color, the two tasks interfere, making a simple color-naming exercise surprisingly demanding.
Questions you could explore
- What does comparing matching and conflicting words help reveal?
- What would a slow response fail to tell us about a particular person?
Start reading
- J. Ridley Stroop; Classics in the History of Psychology, York UniversityStudies of Interference in Serial Verbal Reactions
Stroop’s original paper describes the reading and color-naming experiments; the historical tasks are not individual diagnostic tests.
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