Background: In 1935, John Stroop published the results of his research into how people respond when presented with conflicting signals. Stroop noted that most people are able to read words quickly and that they cannot easily ignore them and focus on other attributes of a printed word, such as text color. For example, consider the following list of words:

It is easy to quickly read this list of words. It is also easy to read the words even if the words are printed in color, and even if the text color is different from the color of the word. For example, people can read the words in the list

as quickly as they can read the list that isn’t printed in color.

However, Stroop found that if people are asked to name the text colors of the words in the list (red, yellow, blue, green, red, green), it takes them longer. Psychologists believe that this is because the reader has to inhibit a natural response (reading the word) and produce a different response (naming the color of the text).

If Stroop is correct, people should be able to name colors more quickly if they do not have to inhibit the word response, as would be the case if they were shown the following:

Transcribed Image Text:

green blue red blue yellow red