✦1 players · 1 minName the colour.
Not the word.

Sixty seconds. Easy for about four of them, and then your own reading starts working against you.

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✦ Why it works

You are fighting your own fluency.

John Ridley Stroop published this in 1935 and it has held up better than almost anything else in psychology, because it is so easy to feel. Reading is not something you choose to do. Put a word in front of a literate adult and it is already read, and there is no version of looking at BLUE where the meaning waits politely for permission.

Naming a colour is a deliberate act by comparison. So on a mismatched trial two answers arrive at different speeds, the wrong one first, and you have to suppress it before the right one can get out. The delay is not you being slow. It is the cost of overriding something automatic.

✦ Worth knowing

The number worth watching.

Most versions of this give you a score and stop. The score depends as much on how many trials you got through as on how fast each one was, which makes it close to meaningless between two people.

This also reports the thing the experiment is actually about: your median on matching trials against your median on mismatched ones. That difference is your Stroop effect in milliseconds, and comparing it across two of your own runs is worth far more than comparing a score against a stranger.

✦ How to play

Three steps, and none of them is signing up.

1
Pick a mode

Colours, or words and arrows if you would rather not rely on telling red from green.

2
Answer the ink

Four buttons, or keys 1 to 4. A wrong answer costs 50 points and locks the buttons for a moment.

3
Sixty seconds

Then a score, an accuracy figure, a median reaction time and your own Stroop effect.

✦ Questions

Stroop challenge, answered.

It is the delay you feel when a colour word is printed in the wrong colour. Reading is automatic after a few years of practice and naming a colour is not, so the written word arrives first and has to be pushed aside. Most people are between 100 and 300 milliseconds slower on a mismatched trial than a matching one.
Yes, with the other mode. Words and arrows works the same way but uses position instead of colour: the word UP might appear at the bottom of the screen and you answer where it is rather than what it says. Same interference, same scoring, and it is on the start screen as an equal choice rather than hidden in a setting.
The effect is real and has been studied since 1935. This is not a clinical instrument though. It runs in a browser on whatever hardware you have and controls for nothing, so a bad round means you were distracted rather than anything else. Treat it as a game that happens to be measuring something genuine.
A correct answer is worth 100 points plus up to 100 more for speed, and every 5 in a row adds a 10 per cent multiplier up to double. A wrong answer costs 50 and locks the buttons briefly, which is what stops anybody hitting all four. Your best is kept in your own browser and never sent anywhere.
Honestly, no. A visual Stroop task needs you to see the stimulus and answer within about a second, and announcing three stimuli a second is unusable. We would rather say that plainly than ship a label that technically exists and does not help. The buttons, timer and result are all properly marked up and keyboard-operable.

The game is free forever.
The rest of it is the hard part.

EvyOS holds the goals, projects and tasks the team goes back to once the game is over.

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