What Is The Stroop Effect?

In " The Neurology of Free Will," Charles Duhigg puts a special importance on habits –their inner working and how they can change. Duhigg describes how habits work through the cycle of cue, routine, and reward. Angie Bachmann from being a bored housewife to losing all her money through uncontrollable gambling.

The Stroop experiment by J. Ridley Stroop in 1935 was performed in order to analyze the reaction time of participant’s stimuli and desired results while also obtaining a collective result of color interference and word reading(Stroop, 1935; Lee & Chan, 2000). In the experiment three forms of the test were given, the first consisting of color patches, the second had the color words printed in black and the other was an incongruent test beaming the color did not match the color word

Automaticity can be defined as the habitual setting of the mind to accept challenges and perform duties without meditating upon the small details that they entail. In military science, it refers to the training of the soldiers to habitually practice and perform certain duties and roles instinctively. It is usually because of training, learning and continued practice that the function or duty becomes preconscious. Soldiers having undergone a thorough training after their recruitment are automatically physically and mentally prepared to engage in battles and wars.

The aim of this experiment is to study autonomic processes by replicating the previously carried out Stroop effect by using numbers. A number of 180 random participants aged in between 18-89 were recruited to participate in this experiment. Participants were presented with a stroop experiment task sheet which consists of three parts which was the control, congruent and incongruent conditions. Time was taken and recorded for each participant to say out the number of stars in the control condition and to say out the number of numbers in the congruent and incongruent conditions. Based on the results, participants took a considerably longer time to say the number of number in the incongruent condition than in the congruent condition.

The Stroop effect was tested on four different tasks. Nineteen Queens College students were recruited by flyer, and each were assigned to a word reading task, color reading task, color inhibition task, and word inhibition task. They were timed using a stopwatch function on a cell phone, to name the color, or word to the quickest of their ability. In the order from longest reaction time to shortest: inhibition color naming task, color naming task, inhibition word reading, and word reading. This study shows that people can read words more quickly than they can name colors, and that inhibiting an automatic response to color/word tasks will take longer to do than tasks that do not involve inhibition.

Habit as defined in Webster’s as a: a behavior pattern acquired by frequent repetition or physiologic exposure that shows itself in regularity or increased facility of performance b : an acquired mode of behavior that has become nearly or completely involuntary (Merriam-Webster Dictionary Online, 2011). Behavior is the manner of conducting oneself or anything that an organism does involving action and response to stimulation. In everyday life habits are formed and intertwined with ones behavior. People are often associated with the way they behave

It is proposed that one's behaviour is an involuntary act that is directly linked to the

In another study, five experiments were conducted to determine if coloring a single Stroop element reduced automaticity or slowed the processing of a color. The results demonstrated that indeed it slowed processing of congruent and neutral stimuli more than it slows processing of incongruent stimuli (Monahan, 2001).

An interesting challenge arises when a task such as color naming is identified as both controlled and automatic, by varying the other task involved. Color naming is identified as a controlled process when the other task is word reading, but as an automatic process when the other task is shape naming. Cohen, Dunbar and McClelland (1990) proposed an alternative explanation of the Stroop effect, which does not distinguish between automatic and controlled processing. Instead, they proposed that automaticity is a range, and that Stroop interference depends on the relative degree of learning the particular tasks, not on processing speed.

Once an automatic thought occurs within the individual, it triggers a feeling, which in turn triggers the individual’s response, such as a behavior and/or physiological response. For example, after a young child begins to pick up his blocks to be put away, his mother rubs him on the back and gives him praise for his actions. His automatic thought may be, “I am good when I put away blocks,” triggering a feeling of confidence, an increased level of physical energy, and the behavior of putting away the remaining blocks.

Volition is believed to govern over the lower subsystems of the hierarchy (Kielhofner & Burke, 1980). The middle subsystem is defined as habituation. Habituation is responsible for organizing behavior into roles, patterns, and routines. Roles reflect a group of behaviors with which an individual may have certain expectations of performance. The individual's beliefs and society influence these expectations. Roles contribute to self-identity and influence behavior. This organization allows for certain behaviors to be performed automatically and adapted to various environments. Performance, the lowest subsystem within the hierarchy, consists of the skills necessary for producing behavior. These include perceptual-motor processing skills, cognition, and communication. The function of the performance subsystem is to produce behaviors called

Psychology is a broad subject filled with many different theories, several theories of which that were particularly interesting fall under the topic “The Learning Perspective”. In fact, Learning is described as the acquisition of knowledge or skills through experience, study, or by being taught. This paper takes a leap further into the psychology and true meaning behind the Learning Perspective, as well as its Biological Importance in our everyday lives. The ideology behind his perspective basically revolves around the idea that behavior is trained, conditioned, reinforced and essentially reflexive. Two of the main theories are listed as follows; The Behaviorism theory and The Cognitive theory. Each theory draws a clear distinction about its differences and similarities with its connection to stimuli. For example, in both sub theories, such as Classical Conditioning and Operant Conditioning, an action is done and a specific response is given. What sets both theories apart are the positivity or negativity of the reward for the action. From this paper, the importance of Learning is discussed as well as the effectiveness of the different theories and its principles that define and set each other apart.

We tend to think of habits as bad (smoking, cussing, biting your fingernails) but they can also be good (walking the dog, oatmeal for breakfast, a weekly date with your spouse). THE POWER OF HABIT shows how easily habits form. They rely on three simple things–a cue, a routine, and a reward–and don’t take long to stick. Our brains love habits. They allow us to be efficient. They help us do things like drive a car without constant self-monitoring. Once we learn where the brake pedal is and how hard to press the

     When the brain recognizes familiar tasks it processes the information and applies the correct rules to the procedure in order to reduce the demand on the working memory and allow for higher order processing of information. Automaticity is the ability to effortlessly complete everyday tasks with low interference of other simultaneous activities and without conscious thought. The development of automaticity involves a shift in brain usage and a reduction in brain activity. As skills are repeated, the brain recognizes the information and can process it more quickly and with less effort(Cook).

We are creatures of habit. Whether they are good or bad, habits shape our actions and help us get through our days. As Charles Duhigg describes in his book, The Power of Habit: Why We Do What We Do in Life and Business, habits “emerge because the brain is constantly looking for ways to save effort.” They are routines that automate parts of our behavior. Habits can be so firmly ingrained into our neural networks that we aren’t actually conscious of them, and we don’t need to put much thought to follow through them.