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Note on Construction of Stroop-Type Stimuli

1969; SAGE Publishing; Volume: 29; Issue: 3 Linguagem: Inglês

10.2466/pms.1969.29.3.914

1558-688X

Arthur S. Kamlet, Howard E. Egeth,

Ergonomics and Musculoskeletal Disorders

In the typical Stroop (1935) test S is presented with a list of incongruously colored color names, e.g., the word 'RED' printed in blue ink, and is required to rapidly name the color of each item in the list. Response time for this task is considerably slower than for a control condition employing colored patches. [For a recent review see Jensen and Rohwer ( 1966) .] Constructing these incongruously colored color names is generally a long, tiring, and frustrating experience. A relatively fast, neat, and economical method of generating Stroop-type stimuli is to use plastic label tapes and an appropriate embossing tool (DYMO Labelmaker or tapewriter, Dymo Industries, Inc., P. 0 . Box 1030, Berkeley, CA 94701; ROTEX labeler, Avery Products Corp., 215 W. 1 3 1 s St., Los Angeles, CA 90061; LABELO N embossing cape, Labelon Corp., 10 Chapin St., Canadaigua, NY 14424). These tapes come in a wide variery of sizes and colors, are usually glossy in appearance, and the resulting stimuli are white letters on a colored background. Two Suoop-test experiments were conducted (Kamlet & Egeth, 1969). In Exp. I the stimuli were letters embossed on strips of %-in. wide plastic label tape. The strips were arranged on white cardboard sheets in five columns of 10 strips each. In Exp. I1 lettering was done with a silk screen process and thus the letters themselves, and not their backgrounds, were colored. There were 48 items arranged in 24 pairs on a sheet. Ten B.A. level laboratory workers at the Human Engineering Laboratories and 12 Johns Hopkins undergraduates served as Ss in Exps. I and 11, respectively. In each experiment S read through a control sheet in which each item consisted of four Xs. After a 1%-min. pause he read the sheet containing the color names. This procedure was repeated once. The respective mean reading times for the color name items and control items were 37.5 and 23.9 sec. in Exp. I and 37.9 and 25.4 sec. in Exp. 11. For each experiment two-tailed t tests showed that these differences were indeed significant (9 < .01). Thus, label-tape stimuli are at least as effective in producing Stroop-type interference as are incongruously colored color names.