An Investigation into the Stroop Effect using words and shapes.

Gemma Burton 8133

An Investigation into the

Stroop Effect using words

and shapes.

Gemma Burton 8133

Abstract

The experimenter aimed to prove that response times would be longer when the shapes were being read. This is reflected in the hypothesis, There will be longer response times when the shapes are read because the shape words will interfere. The experiment carried out was similar to the original stroop effect (Stroop 1935) but shapes were used instead of colours. Participants were chosen by opportunity sampling as only a small amount of people were available. The experiment was tested by asking the participants to read a series of words surrounded by shapes (condition 1) and for the second condition was to name the surrounding shape. The time took to complete each condition was recorded and the experimenter’s prediction was correct to say that the response time for the second condition would be slower. This is because reading is such an automatic thing therefore condition 1 was likely to be easier. This concludes that a person’s attention can not be focused fully on one task and something called automatic processing forces people to read the word instead of the shape.

Gemma Burton 8133

Introduction

The chosen topic area was attention.

Attention merges with perception as both are concerned with what we become aware of in our environment. E.g. we can only perceive things we are attending to and we can only attend to things we can perceive.

The specific area which was studied was divided attention. This is where we allocate our available attentional resources to coordinate our performance of more than one task at a time. However, divided attention can fail when we are unable to divide our attention between all of the stimuli or tasks which we wish to perform, though some tasks are difficult to perform together.

Neisser and Becklen (1975) conducted an experiment to demonstrate how performance suffers in divided attention tasks. According to them there is a structured flow of information involved in the perception of events. If we are following one particular flow of information, it is impossible to follow another, unrelated flow of information. However Neisser and Becklen hypothesized that improvement in performance can occur as a result of practice.

A lot of skilled tasks that we perform (e.g. walking, writing etc.) once required a lot of attention but now are automatic. A number of critical variables can influence performance on attention tasks such as: Practice, degree of similarity between competing tasks and the difficulty of the tasks.

Allport (1980) gave the example of people who demonstrate a capacity to handle two inputs at once. E.g. musicians who can shadow a prose message while sight reading music or, subjects who can read letters aloud and add digits. Usually in these types of dual tasks, the subjects are often highly skilled in one of the tasks.

Shriffren and Schneider (1977) said that subjects who can perform two tasks at once are displaying “automatic processing” which is when the stimuli trigger existing sequences of operations in long term memory. These operations do not require attention so there are ...