... incongruent colours. They were then asked not to read the words, but to state the colour of each written word. The participants took a lot more time to accomplish this task in comparison to the first one. Stroop therefore concluded that the automatic process of reading can interfere with, in this case, the colours of the words. This has inspired many psychological studies into cognitive behaviour and interference. For example, participants have been asked to name famous paintings without reading the name of them printed underneath. The results of studies like this have shown that participants struggle to ignore any words involved in a task. Stroop's original theory for the stroop effect is that some processes, such as reading, are automatic. Other processes, such as identifying colours, are not automatic. Our attempt to carry out a non-automatic task is therefore interfered by another task being carried out automatically. There ...

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