The Stroop Effect

Why is it that is it much harder to say the color that a word is printed in than just reading the word? This is called the stroop effect. When we did this experiment in the our class it took about twice as long for us to read the color of the world compared to the time it took to read the meaning of the word . This is because reading is something that comes naturally while identifying the color takes more processing and therefore takes longer. This observation was made in the 1930s by John Ridley Stroop. He discovered that when there is a direct conflict between the color of the word and it's meaning  two parts of the brain is stimulated at the same time and our brain has to make as decision what stimuli to pay more attention to. The right side of the brain reads the word while the left side analyzes the color. The brain becomes conflicted and it slows down our response time.