Stroop Effect

In psychology, the Stroop effect is a delay in reaction time between congruent and incongruent stimuli, most famously demonstrated when a person is shown a color word printed in a mismatched ink, such as the word red printed in blue, and asked to name the ink color rather than read the word. Because the brain automatically reads the word, that reading interferes with the separate task of identifying the ink color, producing slower responses and more errors, and the effect has become one of the most studied demonstrations of how the mind handles conflicting information.