Stroop / Selective Attention
Name the ink colour while ignoring the word. The Stroop effect is one of the most reproducible findings in cognitive psychology — feel it for yourself.
How to run it
- 1.Each trial shows a colour word printed in a colour.
- 2.Choose the colour of the ink, not the word itself.
- 3.Congruent and incongruent trials are mixed; compare your two average times at the end.
Interactive demonstration
Trial 1 of 16 — choose the ink colour.
How this demonstration works
Trials are generated locally from a fixed colour set and shuffled. Each response time is captured with performance.now(). The summary splits trials into congruent (word matches ink) and incongruent (word conflicts with ink) and reports the difference — your Stroop interference.
What the science says
Reading is highly automatic in fluent readers, so the word meaning is processed whether you want it or not and must be suppressed to report the ink colour. That suppression costs time, usually tens to a few hundred milliseconds. The effect is a demonstration of automaticity and conflict control, not a measure of a person's attentional capacity or any condition.
Sources
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