Indian Film Industry as a Medium Promotion in Tourism

The Stroop Test is widely used to measure an individual’s ability to inhibit the cognitive interferences that occur when processing one stimulus affects the simultaneous processing of the second stimulus (Stroop, 1935).

The original study conducted by John Ridley Stroop involved a list of words printed in different colors, where the subject was asked to name the ink color while ignoring the meaning of the word. The results of the experiment revealed that people were slower and made higher mistakes whenever there was a clash between the word meaning and the word color (e.g., the word 'blue' in green color).

The test focuses on the subject’s “selective attention”, that is, the ability to respond to certain environmental stimuli while ignoring others. This is because individuals are conditioned to look at the color word (such as the word blue, red, green or yellow) instead of focusing on the color of the word’s print.

The task also requires the subject to build “mental flexibility”. Due to mental sets that individuals have built over the years, they get used to processing the word meaning while ignoring the physical features of words, which soon it becomes a learned response. The Stroop test requires a completely new and unlearnt response, which is opposite what is normally done.

While conducting the Stroop Test, the subject would be asked to observe words of three types: it could either be Incongruent, where the meaning of the words and color of the words are different, or Congruent, where the meaning of the words and color of the words are the same, or Neutral, where the meaning of the words is not related to any colors. In all cases, the participant is required to respond with the color of the word. As the test is most commonly taken on the computer in the present day, the subject would have to press the 1-2-3-4 number keys on the top of the keyboard, which correlates with Red, Blue, Green, and Yellow respectively.

During the test, the reaction time is also recorded when the color of the word doesn't match the name of the word. The results would demonstrate cognitive interference at numerous levels, thus highlighting the role of learning, attention, and memory in stimuli recognition.

Numerous theories have come to describe the Stroop effect and together, they are known as the “race models”. As both relevant and irrelevant stimuli are processed parallelly, there is a race between them to enter the central processor in the brain while response selection takes place. All the theories of Processing speed, Selective attention, Automaticity, and Parallel distributed processing present different approaches but at the end, they converge towards the same objective: determining the colors are more complicated than reading the color word, as the latter is simpler and automatic and so a conflict between these two increases the time of processing.

A practical application of the Stroop Test is to use words that are anxiety-related or depression-related amidst neutral words. Subjects who are suffering from anxiety would show an exaggerated Stroop effect when the anxiety-related words are used. This is known as the e-Stroop test or emotional Stroop, which is used to assess a wide range of psychopathology (Williams et al., 1996). In fact, the increasing use of computer-based tests have added to the utility of testing the Stroop effect, as it is can be automated, accessed, and implemented in a straightforward manner. It requires minimal preparation and is a fit for a wide range of cultural groups.

The Stroop effect has thus been studied in hundreds of researches and has also been translated into most of the major languages.