IndexIntroductionResearchCriticismIntroductionThe studies evaluated in this article all correspond to the Stroop effect, either studying the effect directly or determining the mechanism by which it occurs. The Stroop effect occurs when a written word differs from the color it is written in and can be interpreted as a delay in reaching a correct response when presented with mismatched combinations of words and colors. Say no to plagiarism. Get a tailor-made essay on "Why Violent Video Games Shouldn't Be Banned"? Get an original essayResearchJ. Ridely Stroop was the man who first introduced the Stroop effect, coined by his own name, into modern psychology. In his 1935 study “Studies of Interference in Serial Verbal Reactions,” Stroop studied the effect of interference on reaction times when asked to recite printed words. He based his hypothesis on previous work on interference and inhibition by stating that inconsistency in word-color pairing would result in increased reaction time or an incorrect response. He conducted two versions of his experiment, one with word reading as the task and a second with naming the color of the print. For the first, it used 70 university volunteers (14 male, 56 female). This experiment consisted of four conditions, two lists with two forms, and participants were asked to read the lists as quickly as possible without errors while the experimenter followed a list printed in black ink. Half read the lists in the order b1, d2, d1, b2 and the other half read them in the reverse order to account for the effect of practice or fatigue. The second part of the experiment used 100 university student volunteers tasked with naming the color, not the word. Stroop found that word-color incongruity does not reliably increase time when reading words, but when naming colors the presence of words naming other colors increases reaction times. He then concluded: “The associations that formed between the word stimuli and the response to reading are evidently more effective than those that formed between the color stimuli and the response to names.” (Stroop, 1935) Although there was no formal statement indicating whether Stroop's hypothesis was supported based on the results, it is clear that his hypothesis was partially supported. There is not much room for improvement, Stroop takes practice and the effects of fatigue into account in its methods and has a good representation of the population. If I were to improve in any way, it would be to include more males in the study. Zajano and Gorman in their 1986 study, “Stroop Interference as a Function of Percentage of Congruent Items,” sought to validate the Stroop effect while investigating the potential for additional contributors to the response competition. They hypothesized: “if the interference effect can be explained entirely in terms of such response competition, the mixed list used in the present study should result in a direct linear function of response times in relation to the percentage of congruent items.” (Zajano & Gorman, 1986) Their experiment consisted of a one-factor within-subjects design, with 33 college students (31 female, 2 male) volunteering to undergo the study. Subjects were then administered 11 lists with different levels of color-word congruence, in randomized order, followed by an additional list of 0% congruence. The results showed that competition between responses caused the difference in reaction times, and with a 95% CI all points weresignificantly influenced by this competition between responses. The authors concluded that, due to the “curvilinear” nature of the data, the inhibition is consistent with that of selective attention caused by response inhibition. Their hypothesis was supported by their results. The only problem is that this experiment lacks subjects; there are only 2 males with 31 females, this is not a good representation of the population and therefore cannot be safely generalised. MacKinnon, Geiselman, and Woodward studied how effort affects Stroop interference in their 1985 study "Effects of Effort on Stroop Interference." Their study used 64 subjects (32 male, 32 female) selected from an introductory psychology course at UCLA. Each subject was provided with 4 lists: a practice list with neutral colored words, a control list with plus signs (+) instead of words and 2 Stroop lists. Subjects were then asked to name the color of the print while being timed by the experimenter. Order was counterbalanced across subjects. The experiment included two conditions: low incentive, where the subjects were explained that the test was just practice, and high incentive, where the subjects were explained that the test was a competitive game. The authors hypothesized “that competition and the existence of a desired reward would lead to greater [subject] effort than a non-competition procedure. As a result of this manipulation of task-specific effort, Stroop interference should be reduced if the interference can be brought under attentional control.” (MacKinnon, Geiselman, & Woodward, 1985) The results were that a low incentive had no significant effect, whereas a high incentive had the effect of reducing Stroop interference in support of the hypothesis. The authors concluded that Stroop interference could be reduced if efforts were made to do so. I don't see any room for improvement here; subjects were not told the true intentions of the study to avoid good/bad subject bias, and there was a good sample of the population. Augustinova and Ferrand studied the automaticity of reading printed words in their 2014 study “Automaticity of Word Reading: Evidence from the semantic Stroop paradigm.” Their study contained no argument because it was just a comprehensive evaluation of other work rather than an independent study. Because this was a compilation of several other previous studies, there was no formal procedure or hypothesis to report. However, where this study lacked a formal procedure, it reconciled this deficit with complete data. The following finding may represent the sum of these data: no matter how much effort is used to inhibit it, reading a word is automatic. Augustinova and Ferrand concluded that the Stroop effect could be caused or at least amplified by the automaticity of reading words when asked to name the color of the print if the word represents a different word. This study does not have solid testing but still claims causality; I would like to see an original work done rather than rehashing several previous studies together. The final study is “Time course of inhibition in the color-response and word-response versions of the Stroop task.” completed Sugg and MsDonald in 1944. This experiment used 56 subjects, who were college students, required to take a course at New Mexico State University. This study aims to validate or refute the hypotheses of previous works on which this one is based, however it is never specified what these hypotheses are. The subjects faced each other.