Brains

Yummy.

I am a dork. An unapologetic, unabashed Wikipedia-level trivia dork. Recently my Psych professor asked me to write a simple 1-page report on a computer simulation of the Stroop effect, an interesting little flash game with a chintzy “score card” at the end. I had to. I just had to.

In an hour, what had previously been a simple keyword plug-and-chug assignment transformed itself into a safari of statistical, psychological and historical odds and ends. I wanted to include a bit about Wilhelm Wundt (who deserves more credit than Stroop for the test, and I’ve always liked structuralists anyway) but I barely managed to cram this monster into a page, so I had to end it there.

The Stroop effect is a dramatic example of the automatic and interconnected processes which our brain uses to identify goals and common tasks in life; in this case, reading and identifying colors.

In the simulation, the hypothesis I chose was that color patches are easier to name than incongruously-colored words.

Upon completion of the simulation, the Psyk-Trek software compiled a list of times between slides, revealing that their operational definition of “easier” was the length of time the user took. This is a fine working definition, although in a more controlled environment factors like the number of errors might also be considered.

The simulation’s compilation of my test results showed that the mean time between color patch slides (the control) was 5.26 seconds, while the mean time between improperly-colored words (the experiment) was 7.26 seconds. At ten slides each, the standard deviation became 0.65 and 1.17, respectively. Psyk-Trek also confirmed that the results had a lower p-value than 0.65, which seems unusually high for an experiment until one considers this is a single test subject.

In conclusion, this test is a highly consistent and easily demonstrable example of cognitive processes. Stroop’s inferences were that, in viewing a word, our brains immediately recognize the word and think of the color it means. When this color is not the color the subject is attempting to determine, it produces dissonance as well as a higher incidence of false positives.

Interestingly, performance in the Stroop test can be affected by areas in the frontal cortex (as may be expected) as well as several Brodmann areas (9-12 and 45-47) and even key parts of the hippocampus. These Brodmann areas are strongly connected to the thalamus as well as the basal ganglia, areas which are strongly associated with both action selection and sensation.

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