Abstract
This research paper examines the Stroop effect of colored objects. The phenomenon expresses the length of time that a person takes to name the color of a word printed on an object. If the word is printed using the same color that it suggests, the time is taken to name it is relatively shorter than when it is done differently. In this paper, three students were used to identify the colors of butterflies in both congruently and incongruently arranged experiments.
Introduction
The Stroop effect refers to an event that temporarily puts the brain into a state of confusion as an individual differentiates conflicting phenomena. An American psychologist, John Ridley Stroop, revealed that it was easy to identify colors that were put down in words that depicted their meaning.
Similarly, it was more difficult to interpret the same words when they were written in other colors other than the ones that they represented. This phenomenon is known as incongruent stimuli. In the context of this essay, butterflies are used to represent objects of different colors. This paper seeks to examine the impact of the Stroop effect of colored butterflies on the unconscious brain.
Method
The experiment was conducted on three students whose ages lied between 19 and 20 years. Butterflies of different colors were presented in PowerPoint slides. Their names were written below each picture in black color (neutral stimuli). The slides were then organized in a congruent and incongruent manner. In the congruent slides, black color was used to put down the names of the butterflies. However, the colors of the names were chosen randomly in the incongruent slides.
The three students were required to name the color of each butterfly’s wings. At the outset, they were shown the congruent slides. The time that they took to identify the colors in all the slides was recorded against the number of correct answers that they provided (Luo & Proctor, 2013). The same process was repeated using the incongruent slides, and both the time and number of correct answers were recorded.
Results
The results that were obtained for each student in both the congruent and incongruent slides were recorded in the table below.
The first student was Reem. He was able to name ten colors correctly out of the 13 butterflies that were shown in a period of 9.62 seconds. In the case of the incongruent slides, the number of colors that were identified correctly was still the same. However, the time that was taken to identify them increased to 11.24 seconds.
The second student was 19 years old, Hezza. In the first test, Hezza was able to name all the colors on the wings of the butterflies in a period of 9.97 seconds correctly. In the second test, the student was only able to identify 10 of the 13 incongruent slides correctly. This process took about 14.02 seconds.
The third student, 20-year-old Moza, was able to identify 12 out of 13 colors of the wings of the butterflies correctly in the congruent test. The time that Moza took to complete the test was approximately 9.63 seconds. For the second test that entailed the incongruent slides, Moza was only able to identify 11 out of 13 colors in 13.20 seconds.
Discussion
A close examination of the congruent column reveals that the numbers of the correctly identified colors were 10, 13, and 12. These numbers are higher than the ones that are recorded in the corresponding incongruent column, which are 10, 10, and 11, respectively. Reem was the only student who identified the same number of colors, both in the congruent and incongruent tests. The other two students identified more colors correctly in the congruent than in the incongruent test.
The times that the students took to identify the colors in the first test were 9.62, 9.97, and 9.63 seconds respectively. No student took more than 10 seconds to name all the 13 colors that were shown in the slides. In the incongruent test, Reem took 11.24 seconds to identify colors while Hessa and Moza took 14.02 and 13.20 seconds, respectively.
On average, the three students were able to identify {(10 + 13 + 12)/3 = 11.67} of the butterfly colours in the congruent test correctly. The average time that they took to identify these colors was (9.62 + 9.97 + 9.63)/3 = 9.74 seconds. Therefore, it can be deduced that they took an average of 9.74 seconds to identify 11.67 out of the 13 colors correctly in the congruent test.
In the second test that involved the incongruent stimuli, the students were able to identify (10 + 10 + 11)/3 = 10.33 out of the 13 possible colors appropriately. The students took an average time of (11.24 + 14.02 + 13.20)/3 = 12.82 seconds to identify 10.33 colours the test.
A comparison of the two averages from each test shows that the number of colors that were identified appropriately in the congruent test is higher than that of the incongruent experiment. However, more time was spent in the incongruent than in the congruent test because of the Stroop effect (Mama, Ben-Haim, & Algom, 2013).
According to Zhang, Ding, Li, Zhang, and Chen (2013), the unconscious human brain normally uses the semantic meaning of the word that a person reads. If the color of the butterfly on the slide is pink, but the name of the color written in black is green, the brain will first think of the green color (Zhang et al., 2013).
On realizing that the color on the butterfly is not green, it has to seek its identification from the wings of the butterfly. The process takes more time than when the color corresponds to the name that bears its meaning. This situation explains why the students took more time to comprehend the incongruent Stroop effect experiment (Panadero, Castellanos, & Tudela, 2015).
Chances of confusion as the brain try to move from semantic meaning to countercheck the name of the color are high (Hilbert, Nakagawa, Bindl, & Bühner, 2014). This situation was evident due to the fewer number of correct answers that were provided by the students in the incongruent test. In conclusion, the use of neutral stimuli leads to the occurrence of the Stroop effect in both colored objects and words.
Reference List
Hilbert, S., Nakagawa, T., Bindl, M., & Bühner, M. (2014). The spatial Stroop effect: A comparison of color-word and position-word interference. Psychonomic Bulletin & Review, 21(6), 1509-15.
Luo, C., & Proctor, R. (2013). Asymmetry of congruency effects in spatial Stroop tasks can be eliminated. Acta Psychologica, 143(1), 7-13
Mama, Y., Ben-Haim, M., & Algom, D. (2013). When emotion does and does not impair performance: A Garner theory of the emotional Stroop effect. Cognition & Emotion, 27(4), 589-602.
Panadero, A., Castellanos, M., & Tudela, P. (2015). Unconscious context-specific proportion congruency effect in a Stroop-like task. Consciousness & Cognition, 31(1), 35-45.
Zhang, L., Ding, C., Li, H., Zhang, Q., & Chen, A. (2013). The influence of attentional control on stimulus processing is category-specific in Stroop tasks. Psychological Research, 77(5), 599-610.