Stroop effect
Efecto Stroop
- Date
- 1935 · confidence high
- Place
- George Peabody College, Nashville, Tennessee, United States
- Credited to
- John Ridley Stroop
- Field
- Life & health
⚠️ Disputed: the sources disagree.
What was discovered
Stroop showed that naming the ink colour of a word takes longer and causes more errors when the word itself names a different colour (e.g. the word "blue" written in red), due to interference between automatic reading and colour naming.
German psychologist Erich Rudolf Jaensch had described a similar effect in 1929, six years before Stroop's English-language publication, which is the one that gave the phenomenon its name.
What it led to
- Stroop test as a clinical neuropsychology tool
- Experimental study of selective attention and executive function
- Use in neuroimaging studies of cognitive control