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toc = = = The Stroop Effect! =

Hypothesis
I hypothesize that girls will react more rapidly to the stroop effect than boys.

Stroop Test

 * Orange ** ** Grey Red Green Yellow Purple Brown Red Blue Green Orange Purple Grey Yellow Red Blue Brown Red Green Orange Purple Brown Red Green Grey Blue Orange **

**Materials List**

 * 1) Stroop Test
 * 2) Stroop Test Answer Key
 * 3) Stop Watch
 * 4) Pencil
 * 5) Testers (8 girls and 8 boys)
 * 6) Data Table

**Detailed Procedure**

 * 1) Gather all Materials
 * 2) Test one student with Stroop Test
 * 3) Time each student and record time
 * 4) Count how many wrong answers
 * 5) Add 3 seconds for every wrong answer
 * 6) Repeat with 15 other students
 * 7) Find girls and boys average

Experimental Design
I am going to conduct an experiment that will help me determine if boys or girls react more rapidly to the stroop effect. I will be conducting my experiment in a quiet room with low background noise. There will be 16 testers and then I will keep track of their scores. I will test 8 girls and 8 boys, keeping track of the time it takes to accomplish the test and I will add a 3 second penalty to their time whenever they answer wrong. I will record all the data on a printed out copy of a spreadsheet, which I will transfer onto a computer in school. I will use a digital camera to document the experiment. I plan to put the pictures on Google Documents so I can access them at school. Then, I will print them out and post them on my display board.

Background Research

 * Optic nerve connects the eye and the brain
 * Three types of cone cells in your retina detect red, blue, and green
 * If one type of cone cell is missing then you would be color blind
 * The i ris muscle controls how much light gets in
 * The stroop effect is named after J. Ridley Stroop who discovered this in the 1930s
 * First Theory: Speed of processing Theory, the interference occurs because wordt are read faster than colors are named
 * Second Theory: Selective attention theory, the interference occurs because naming colors requires more attention than reading words.
 * Different areas of the brain specialize in specific tasks and when one area of the brain is active it can hold back activity in other areas
 * The cognitive mechanism involved in the Stroop Task is called **directed attention**
 * The effect was first published in 1929 in German, and its roots can be followed back to works of James McKeen Cattell and Wilhelm Wundt in the nineteenth century
 * Reaction time of a task

Beckelman, Laurie. //The human body//. Pleasantville, NY: Reader's Digest Children's Pub., 1999. Print. " Neuroscience For Kids - stroop effect ." //UW Faculty Web Server//. N.p., n.d. Web. 25 Jan. 2012. . " Stroop Effect ." //Hypnosis//. N.p., n.d. Web. 25 Jan. 2012. . "Stroop effect - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia." //Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia//. N.p., n.d. Web. 26 Jan. 2012. .

Results
The purpose of this experiment was to see if boys or girls would react more rapidly to the stroop effect. I tested 8 boys and 8 girls and recorded the time it took them to complete it. Then, I averaged eachs genders times. The results of this experiment were that girls were faster than boys when it came to averaging the results. Girls took only 27.55 seconds, while boys took 32.03 seconds.

Discussion
My hypothesis was that girls would react more rapidly to the stroop effect than boys did. My results support my hypothesis.A trend in my data would be that the girls consistently got lower times than boys. For example, in one test a girl got 27.41 and the boy got 32.59. The relationship between the independent variable (gender) and the dependent variable (time taken) would be that the girls were always faster than the boys. I think the tests went very smoothly becaus e there were little materials and it didn't take much time to test. If I could improve my experiment, I would make sure the test colors came out better than they were. An interesting future study might be seeing if age matters rather than gender.