10 thoughts to “Today’s Puzzler”

  1. This is based on a psychological experiment called the Stroop test. Oh yes, I’ve spent many hours torturing experimenting on undergraduates with this many years ago. Those were the days!

  5. I don’t know who made it, (I’ve seen it before) I don’t think its American, it could be possibly English or Australian (I hate having to use the word ‘color’ for writing html stuff.)

  7. Its also fun to do this with a colour list which has the same colour for it name and get the participants to read it for you and then do it, or you can use block colours before it and see how that effects there ablitities to say the word.

  8. Funny, I didn’t have much trouble with it. I took a couple of seconds before to tell myself only yo look at the color and not read the word and I busted through it.
    Do you think my being left handed has anything to do with that?

    -Jay

  9. I am right handed and did the same thing Jay did. It’s all a matter of concentration. Just don’t try to actually read the words and it will be alot easier.

  10. The question then becomes: does the time it takes you to do a page of these change if the ink is neutral (e.g., all black), congruent with the word, or conflicting with the word. The answer is it takes significantly longer to say the conflicting ink colors (as in Rich’s example). This tells us that reading is something that sneaks into the perception process a lot earlier then one might think. That is, just seeing the color (and naming it) isn’t all that your brain is doing (whether you like it or not) — yes, you can suppress it’s effect in the naming task, but at a cost (in attention effort and thus time).

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