9 Online Tests You Can Take Now To Discover Everything About Yourself

7. The Stroop Effect

The Stroop Effect is the result of cognitive interference as your brain attempts to process two incongruent pieces of information.

The most elegant way to demonstrate this, is by writing the word for a colour in a different colour, as above. Because your brain inextricably associates a specific meaning, in this case a colour, with the word, but is also being presented with a different colour, it is forced to perform two contradictory calculations at once.

The Stroop Test, in which you generally have to identify the colour of the text and ignore the meaning of the word, measures many things including reaction times, selective attention, cognitive flexibility and executive function. As simple as the test is, it can be used as a tool in the assessment of brain damage, dementia, neurodegenerative disease, ADHD, depression, schizophrenia and other neurological issues.