Stroop Test

Stroop Effect Guides

What the Stroop effect is and why it happens, how it is used in testing and research, and how to read your own results. Each article ends with a list of references.

  1. 01 What Is the Stroop Effect? — From the 1935 Paper to Today's Test When a color name is printed in a different ink, naming the ink color slows down. What Stroop's 1935 paper measured, what it found, and how computerized tasks differ.
  2. 02 Why Does Stroop Interference Happen? — Processing Speed, Automaticity and Selective Attention Once you see a word, ignoring its meaning is hard. The theories that explain Stroop interference — relative speed of processing, automaticity, parallel distributed processing and conflict monitoring — and their limitations.
  3. 03 The Reverse Stroop Effect — When Ink Color Gets in the Way of Reading Usually words interfere with color, but depending on how you respond, color can interfere with words too. When the reverse Stroop effect appears, and how to read this site's “word meaning” mode.
  4. 04 The Stroop in Neuropsychological Testing — What It Can and Cannot Show How clinical Stroop tests such as the Golden version, the Victoria version and the D-KEFS are structured and used, and why a single score cannot make a diagnosis. This site is not a diagnostic tool.
  5. 05 Variants of the Stroop Task — Emotional, Numerical, Spatial and Counting Stroop The Stroop structure — information you must ignore overlapping with the answer — has spread to many tasks. What the emotional Stroop, numerical Stroop, spatial Stroop, counting Stroop and picture-word interference each measure.
  6. 06 What Affects Stroop Interference — Practice, Age and Bilingualism Even for the same person, interference changes with practice, age, the language being read, color vision, task design and how you feel that day. The factors to know before comparing results, with the research behind them.
  7. 07 How to Read Your Stroop Test Results — Interference Effect, Accuracy and Scatter Plot How to read the interference effect, facilitation and inhibition cost, error rate difference, mean and median, and the trial-by-trial scatter plot on the results screen — plus the limits of measurement accuracy and how many runs you need for a reliable picture.

Stroop Color Words in 11 Languages →