Stroop Test

About this test

The effect this game is named after was described by the American psychologist John Ridley Stroop in a 1935 paper. The observation is disarmingly simple: ask someone to name the ink colour a word is printed in, and they will be markedly slower when the word itself names a different colour. "Red" printed in blue costs time. The same blue patch with no text costs none.

The usual explanation is about automaticity. For a trained reader, reading has become involuntary, while naming a colour stays a controlled operation. Both answers arrive at the same output — the mouth, or here the finger — and one has to be suppressed. That braking is measured in tens of milliseconds, and it shows up even in people who swear they did not read the word.

Let us be clear about what this page does: it borrows the idea, it does not reproduce the protocol. A real Stroop task compares congruent and incongruent conditions, times every single response, and is read alongside other measures. Here we count correct answers in forty-five seconds, with a mouse or a thumb. It is fun, it rewards practice, and it is in no way a clinical result.

How it works

A colour word appears, printed in an ink that never matches what it says. You tap the swatch for the ink: the six swatches run red, blue, green, yellow, purple, orange, and keys 1 to 6 do the same from a keyboard. A correct answer adds a point, a wrong one costs only the time you lost. The 0-100 score starts at eight correct answers and tops out at forty-five.