Project SherlockEst. Knowledge

Paper

1935

Studies of Interference in Serial Verbal Reactions

J. Ridley Stroop

Naming the ink colour of a colour word is slower than naming a plain colour patch because reading is so automatic that it interferes with the deliberate task, establishing interference as a basic limit on attention.

Before you start

FreeIntermediatelink checked 17 Sept 2026

Groundwork for

Works in the library that name this one as a prerequisite.

A Feature-Integration Theory of AttentionAnne Treisman & Garry Gelade, 1980Basic visual features such as colour and orientation are registered in parallel and pre-attentively, but combining them into one perceived object requires focused attention, which is why divided attention produces illusory conjunctions.

Filed under Cognitive Psychology in Psychology.