Stroop Task

Created by Dr. Martin Shapiro

Overview

• The website Psychtoolkit.org is a great website for experimental psychology. 

• It has a library of validated surveys and experiments that one can experience. 

• A researcher can also make a free account and conduct research using their surveys and experiments, with the website providing files of data. 

• For his activity, you'll be experiencing one of the most commonly used experimental tasks in psychology and neuroscience called the Stroop task. For a review of how the Stroop has been used in research, see MacLeod, 1991 (article below). 

• The Stroop task involves perception, working memory, and attention. In this task, a word that is the name of a color flashes on the screen for a short amount of time. The color of the font of the word either match (e.g., Red, Blue) referred to as compatible or it does not (e.g., Green, Yellow) referred to as incompatible. While there are many versions of this task, in the most difficult version, one must identify the font color and not the name of the color. For example, if the word Red flashes on the screen, the participant must respond "green." 

• The two common measurements are accuracy and reaction time. One would expect accuracy and reaction time to be affected by whether the font color matches the word name. People often find reading the word to be the automatic response, and it takes deliberative attention to identify the font color. 

• In this activity, you will be doing 40 trials of the Stroop task, and take a screenshot of your results. 

Instructions

• You will need to complete this task on a desktop or laptop computer. It doesn't work well if done on a phone. 

• Download the Excel spreadsheet and the worksheet below. 

• Link to this page https://www.psytoolkit.org/experiment-library/stroop.html

• Start at the top of the page and read.

• Under the section called Run the Demo, click to run a demo for the Stroop task. 

• When you've completed the task, open the Excel spreadsheet and record your response times for congruent (matching word and color) and incongruent (mismatch of word and color) as well as your Stroop task effect. 

• Repeat the task three times. 

• Fill in the data into the worksheet and copy and paste the graphs you created. 

• Answer the questions on the worksheet and submit your assignment.