You
probably spend so much time reading books, magazines, and Facebook posts, that
reading has practically become automatic. Sometimes reading can get in the way
of other things we might want to do. For instance, naming the print
colour of the word GREEN will take longer than the word RED, if both are
printed in red colour. This is
the well-known Stroop effect (1935) named after John Ridley Stroop. 80 years later we are still trying to
understand the source of the Stroop effect.
Recent
technological advances in the measurement of arm-reaching trajectories may provide
us with a unique window into the human mind. Gabriel Tillman and Ami Eidels
from the Newcastle Cognition Lab teamed up with Matthew Finkbeiner from
Macquarie University to design and conduct a motion-tracking Stroop task. Participants
had to identify the colours of words by reaching out to response locations (see
Figure). By analysing movement trajectories we found that interference from the
word grows with the time available for processing, although people were
instructed to ignore the words the whole time.
However,
our results also suggested that in contrast to common belief we may not read
each and every word that enters into our visual field, but rather only read some
proportion of these words.
Read more:
