Verbal Reaction Times Experiment Essay -- Stroop 1935 experiment

This report aimed to replicate Stroop's (1935) experiment. Using the repeated measures design and a sample of 20 students, differences in verbal reaction times on two tests were observed. The one-tailed hypothesis predicted that it would take longer to say words in the Cc, this is the conflicting condition where the colour of the word differs from the colour that the word describes. It was found that, using the t-test for related data, this hypothesis could be accepted as the obtained value was much greater then the critical value. It can therefore be concluded that visual interference does affect people's verbal reactions. Introduction In 1935 John Ridley Stroop published his Ph.D. thesis entitled 'Studies of Interference in Serial Verbal Reactions' - the findings of which became known as 'the Stroop Effect'. Stroop mentioned many studies in his work but the two that are most relevant for this report are Brown (1915) and Telford (1930), they conducted very similar investigations into colour associations and colour recognition patterns respectively. This area of research is known as controlled and automatic processing, it involves studies into how humans cope with divided attention such as multi-tasking. This could be anything from the simple dishwashing and listening to music simultaneously, to complex shadowing of continuous prose presented in one ear, whilst also typing up a separate prose presented to the other ear via headphones (Shaffer 1975). With their two-process theory, Shiffrin and Schneider (1977) make useful distinctions between controlled and automatic processing. They are as follows: controlled processing... ...1930) 'Differences in responses to colours and their names.' J. Genet. Psychol. An Experiment on the Stroop effect and hearing, http://www.ul.ie/~cscw/mikael/stroop.html British Psychological Society Code of Conduct for Psychologists, http://trapdoor.glos.ac.uk/ess/soss/ethics/appendix4.htm Cognitive Psychology, Wadsworth CogLab online laboratory, http://coglab.wadsworth.com/experiments/Stroop/ Neuropsychological Model of the Stroop Effect, http://www.uwm.edu/~neuropsy/Strpmast.html Neuroscience for Kids - The Stroop Effect, http://faculty.washington.edu/chudler/words.html Parametric Assumptions, http://www.sgcorp.com/normality_tests.htm The Stroop Effect - Attention and Memory, http://www.cgl.uwaterloo.ca/~bgbauer/chapters/stroop.html The t-test, http://trochim.human.edu/kb/stat_t.htm