▶ BCM240 Media, Audience, Place
I saw this test a long time ago online and this was the first thing that came to my mind when we talked about multitasking and switch tasking. I tried doing the test again myself and since I already know what to expect from it since I’ve seen it in the past and know how it works — I did much better than I did before when I first discovered this test.
After researching, I found that this specific test actually has a name to it. It is called the Stroop Test, and when you attempt the test you get the Stroop Effect. To elaborate on this topic, we need to understand how us humans perceive and interact with the world (Farnsworth, 2019). Whenever we look at something; whether it is an object or a place we not only look at the physical appearance of it, but also the meaning behind it. This is where the test comes to play, you can see that each word has a different colour to it — however if you noticed or not — the colour of the word is not the right colour that corresponds to the word.
I decided to test this on my mum, I first showed her the photo then I asked her what she noticed about it. Her first response was to tell me that it’s just colours, so with that I asked her to read out the words and ignore the colours. She read it with ease and asked me what was the point of the test, I laughed and asked her if it was easy and she responded of course. Little did she know what I was about to ask her next, I then told her to read out each colour of the word whilst ignoring the actual text. This frustrated her as she made a few mistakes and pauses while reading it out, we both ended up laughing because she was close to giving up since it made her confused but I told her to proceed on.
I told her why exactly this happens and explained what I had researched prior doing the test on her, she found it really interesting and asked me if there were other tests that were similar and it got me thinking as well. I decided to try searching the internet and to my surprise there are different kinds of Stroop tests. When I found this test I thought to myself that this would be a lot more difficult because you would need a lot more cognitive thinking, I told my mum that I’ve never done this test before and we both decided to try it out together.
Both of us had a hard time and kept laughing because just like the first test with the colours, we kept making mistakes on this one. Especially because some of the animals that are labelled on top of the images of the animals were complete opposites; for example the image of the bear has the word bird on top of it which contradicts one another since a bear is much larger than a bird.
References
- Farnsworth, B. (2019). The Stroop Effect – How it Works and Why – iMotions. Retrieved 3 July 2020, from https://imotions.com/blog/the-stroop-effect/
Jessica Pauline Camille Ablog Mercado 