How good are you at recognising colours? Maybe you think you pretty much mastered that task at kindergarten! But what if you’re not as good as you think you are? Prepare to be stumped by the Stroop Test.
THE STROOP TEST: PART 1
For the first part of this test you’ll need to use the nonsense words below.
Try reading the colour of each word out aloud as fast as you can. That’s the colour each word is printed in, not the word itself (although I’d be rather impressed if you could actually pronounce ‘XCEVH’!).
Pretty easy, right? Now try PART 2…
THE STROOP TEST: PART 2
To give this part of the test a go you need to use the not-so-nonsense words below. However, you still need to use the same set of rules as for PART 1. That is, you need to read the colour each word is printed in out aloud (not the word). Once again, you need to do this as fast as you possibly can.
Go on, give it a go – no-one’s watching!
Not so easy this time, right?
IMPULSIVE READING
This task is known as the Stroop Test (or Stroop Effect) and is named after the American psychologist who developed it – John Ridley Stroop.
The test takes advantage of the fact that once you’ve learnt to read you simply can’t help doing it!
Reading is a learned skill, and like any such skill, you learn how to do it step-by-step.
First you work out how to recognise letters, then words, then phrases and sentences. And pretty soon you can read Challenge from cover to cover without any problem!
In fact once you become an expert reader you can’t help but look at a word (or a phrase, or a sentence) without reading it. The whole process becomes automatic and pretty much impossible to switch off.
Glance at a billboard or a street sign and you’ll probably read it before you’ve even had a chance to decide whether you’d like to read it or not!
The same story goes for lots of other learned activities – like getting dressed, learning to play a musical instrument, or riding a bike. At first, all the individual bits of each process can seem quite difficult. But as you practise them they become easy and automatic, until you don’t even have to think about doing them.
BRAIN ON AUTO
When you look at each of the words in the second part of the Stroop Test, your brain automatically reads them. It is very difficult to override this ingrained skill and replace it with another task – such as recognising and saying each word’s colour instead.
Because you’ve learnt how to read (and do it all the time without thinking) your brain wants to read.
Part 1 of this task is much easier to complete since the letters in each ‘word’ don’t spell anything recognisable to start with. This time there’s no reading impulse to interfere with the task of colour recognition!
One way around the Stroop Test is to squint your eyes a little and make them fall out of focus. This stops you recognising the words and allows you to rattle off the colours more easily – but that’d be cheating!
DOTTING i’s AND CROSSING t’s
Writing is also a learned skill, and something that’s pretty hard not to do properly. Try writing the following sentence as quickly as you can:
“The sisters always sit up straight in science class.”
Now try the same task again, but this time don’t dot your “i’s” or cross your “t’s”.
I bet it took you longer! And I bet you made a stack of mistakes.
