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Evaluate The Cognitive Perspective Essay

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The cognitive perspective focuses on the underlying mental processes that influence behavior. It is particularly interested in factors that hinder or ease information processing such as attention. Attention is the ability to concentrate on a specific stimulus, which then enables the processing of information. Attention can be affected by many factors such as trying to block out other thoughts while attempting to focus on a particular stimulus. The ability to focus on a specific stimulus is affected by schemas that are an active mental organization of information based on prior experience. Focusing on a specific stimulus becomes difficult with conflicting stimuli such as words and colors or multiple languages.

Mr Stroop who was the psychiatrist behind this experiment was trying to determine how long it would take his selected participants to read a word list that was made up of words that corresponded with colors (congruent). However there were two conditions one that was straight forward and the other involved the change of colors and words, meaning not all the colors corresponded with the specific word (incongruent). Meaning the color blue could have been placed on the word “green”. He timed his participants and hypothesised that the second condition would take the participants more time and that is exactly what happened. We also believe that will happen and we have changed his experiment up to make the colors be substituted with font types. This is based off the fact that the delay in reading the word apart from the color is the lack of ability one would have to deal with color stimulus and the speed in which they are reading also prevents that. …show more content…

The aim was to see how the brain would adjust to the change in conditions between the congruent and incongruent word list. The reaction time was based off how fast the participant would say the color aloud

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