Stroop Effect

The Stroop effect, in which the naming of the colours in which words are printed is slowed down by using colour words (e.g., the word YELLOW printed in red), seems to involve unavoidable and automatic processing of the colour words. However, Kahaneman and Henik (1979) found that the Stroop effect was much larger when the distracting information (i.e., the colour name) was in the same locations as the to-be-named colour rather than in an adjacent location. Thus, the processes producing the Stroop effect are not entirely unavoidable and so not completely automatic.