Human Sciences Blog

The Stroop Effect
This experiment was conducted by John Ridley Stroop. The desired outcomes for this experiment was to find out whether a person's attention can be divided in two different tasks. A series of three stimuli were presented to the participants. The first one demonstrated a sheet with color words in black ink, the second one was the color words with their corresponding color. The participinats were asked to read this as fast as possible. After they did this, the third condition was presented. There were color words with unmatching colors and the person had to read the color instead of the word presented. The outcome was that the average of the third condition lasterd much more longer and had more mistakes than the first two conditions presented. This proved and showed the world that attention can not be divided in two different tasks at once. The brain gets used to things such as reading, and therefore it becomes automatic and if a different thing is asked, it is harder to accomplish.





http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Tpge6c3Ic4g