Stroop Task

Background

When neural engineers are developing technologies such as neural prosthetics, one important aspect to consider is the restoration of sensory feedback. Engineers can use many different ways to provide sensory information to a prosthetic user, but it is important to quantify how well the chosen sensory feedback modality works. One way to measure the usability of sensory feedback is by using the Stroop task. The Stroop task is taken from a study by John Ridley Stroop in 1935, which found that people responded faster to congruent stimuli than incongruent stimuli. In the study, Stroop presented subjects with names of colors written in colors that either matched the name (congruent) or did not match the name (incongruent). He asked subjects to report the color of the word and not the name of the word, and found that subjects responded faster to the congruent words than the incongruent words. Try the Stroop task out for yourself and see how your reaction times measure up!

Instructions

For each word that appears, press the correct key corresponding to the color of the word, not the word itself.

1-Green

2-Red

3-Blue

4-Yellow

The graph will show your reaction times in real time. You can press "End Session" to end your session, upon which you can choose to save your data as a CSV file. If you do not press the "End Session" button, the session will end after 500 trials.