PSGY1015 Practical

Methods in Psychology

Introduction to
Experiments and
PsychoPy with Stroop
Effect

Dr Wong Hoo Keat

hookeat.wong@nottingham.edu.my
 Overview

• Spring semester – this module aims to equip you with:

▪ an understanding of some fundamental studies that have been useful
in Psychology
▪ an understanding of basic software tools often used to run and report
empirical studies
▪ Excel for basic data handling
▪ SPSS for statistical analyses
▪ PsychoPy for presenting stimuli and collecting data

29 January 2024 Dr Hoo Keat, School of Psychology 2

 Module Expectations and Objectives

▪ In this week, you will see a simple classic psychology experiment

replicated using modern technology

▪ You will learn about:

▪ why we should run experiments
▪ the basic components of PsychoPy
▪ conducting simple analyses in Excel

29 January 2024 Dr Hoo Keat, School of Psychology 3

 Course Materials and Lab Computers

▪ All materials will be made available via Moodle, including;

▪ slides from the lectures
▪ the experiments that were run
▪ data files to analyze
▪ You should be able to access Moodle by now to access these materials:
http://moodle.nottingham.ac.uk
▪ Store your files in a destination folder on your Desktop esp. when working on
PsychoPy
▪ Done for the day? Create a backup on Cloud storage or personal external drive
▪ Don’t forget to save your work regularly – computers can crash sometimes.

29 January 2024 Dr Hoo Keat, School of Psychology 4

 Now, let’s talk about SCIENCE

▪ There was a time when people tried to understand the world around us by
introspection:

▪ involves a conscious, deliberate, and subjective evaluation of one's mental

states and experiences

▪ but its use as a research method has declined over time due to concerns
about its reliability and validity

29 January 2024 Dr Hoo Keat, School of Psychology 5

 Now, let’s talk about SCIENCE

▪ When someone has a theory based on their own behaviour, how do we know
that they are right?
▪ Any example of behavioural theory?

▪ We can collect some data and test out theories to help us understand ourselves
and the world we live in.
▪ This is when we conduct Experiments…

29 January 2024 Dr Hoo Keat, School of Psychology 6

 Now, let’s talk about SCIENCE

▪ Sometimes we can collect data by measuring things in the ‘real world’

▪ That is better than just ‘thinking’ because we have more concrete information
▪ But in the ‘real world’ many things vary, in addition to the thing/factor/variable
that you are studying – Confounding Variables
▪ How do you know whether your variable of interest caused the change of
behaviour you measured?
▪ E.g., Gender affects water consumption – Oh, really?!

29 January 2024 Dr Hoo Keat, School of Psychology 7

 Why do we conduct experiments?

▪ To test theories about how our mind works

▪ To verify predictions/hypotheses on human behavior

▪ To find out the cause/origin/underlying mechanism of human

behaviour, by strictly controlling the experiences of participants

29 January 2024 Dr Hoo Keat, School of Psychology 8

 Why do we conduct experiments?

▪ In experiments we aim to let very few things vary

▪ This helps us, when we measure a change, to narrow down its
cause. BUT…

Possibly, when fewer things vary, the less like the ‘real world’ our
experiment becomes. Is it better to know something about an artificial
situation, or to have a good guess about something realistic?

▪ We want to keep things simple, but hopefully they will generalise to

more complex situations

29 January 2024 Dr Hoo Keat, School of Psychology 9

 How do we conduct experiments?

▪ To conduct an experiment successfully, we first must answer several

questions (usually they come in the below sequence):
1. What does the theory predict?
2. How can that prediction be tested?
3. What kind of experimental design will we need?
4. What will the experimental task be?
5. What kind of data helps to test the prediction?
6. How will the data be analyzed?
7. ....
▪ The aim of the practical and statistics modules is to provide you
knowledge and skills needed to ask and answer these questions.
29 January 2024 Dr Hoo Keat, School of Psychology 10
 What kind of predictions can psychological theories
make?

▪ There are many kinds of prediction that can be made by

psychological theories
▪ e.g., reading low-frequency words takes longer than high-
frequency words
▪ Predictions fall into three basic kinds
▪ predictions of direction
▪ predictions of magnitude
▪ predictions of both direction and the magnitude
▪ What each of these different kinds of prediction has in common is
that the underlying theory describes a mental process.

29 January 2024 Dr Hoo Keat, School of Psychology 11

 Studying Mental Processes

▪ In psychology, it might be challenging to identify the mental

mechanism that underlies particular behaviours because we can
hardly ever look at it directly.

29 January 2024 Dr Hoo Keat, School of Psychology 12

 Advances in Studying Mental Processes

▪ New technologies, e.g. PET & MRI scans, have made it possible to
look more directly than we could

29 January 2024 Dr Hoo Keat, School of Psychology 13

 Learning Experiment through The Stroop
Effect (1935)
Measuring the Interference Effects

29 January 2024 Dr Hoo Keat, School of Psychology 14

 The Stroop Effect (1935)

▪ In 1935, John Ridley Stroop published a series of experiments about

a “new” effect

Stroop, John Ridley (1935). Studies of interference in serial verbal

reactions. Journal of Experimental Psychology, 18, 643–662.

▪ In this paper he described an effect of mental processing that is

extremely robust and has become very well known – the Stroop
Effect.

29 January 2024 Dr Hoo Keat, School of Psychology 15

 The Stroop Effect (1935)

▪ Theory: We process information in an orderly way – one after

the other.
▪ If this is true, then when we attend to an apple that’s got a face
drawn on it but are asked to focus on the apple alone…

we should experience interference because we

can’t help noticing the face!

29 January 2024 Dr Hoo Keat, School of Psychology 16

 Predictions based on Stroop Theory

▪ Maybe... our brain processes information one after another…

1. If we recognize words faster than other details,

2. then when told to identify the word colour and,
3. the word spells a different ink identity (colour) – then an interference
should occur
4. If so, it should take us longer to make our minds up!

RED GREEN
29 January 2024 Dr Hoo Keat, School of Psychology 17
 Stroop (1935)

29 January 2024 Dr Hoo Keat, School of Psychology 18

 Stroop (1935)

▪ The paper contains several experiments including this one (Exp 2):
▪ Participants had to say out loud the colour of letters for a series of
100 words printed on some cards
▪ The letters were also spelling out names of other colours (the
name and the colour were incongruent)
▪ For comparison he also measured the time taken to call out the
colour of 100 squares (control condition).
▪ Results: subjects took longer to call out the letter colours than the
colours of blocks

29 January 2024 Dr Hoo Keat, School of Psychology 19

 Stroop (1935): Alternative Explanation - Problem

▪ Maybe subjects were faster with the squares Congruent

because there was more red ink on the squares? RED

BLUE
GREEN
YELLOW
▪ An alternative control would be to use
▪ red letters to spell the word red (word and Incongruent
colour are congruent) BLUE
▪ green letters to spell the word red (word and YELLOW
RED
colour are incongruent) GREEN
▪ The Stroop effect has now been examined in
many different variants of behavioural tasks

29 January 2024 Dr Hoo Keat, School of Psychology 20

 Stroop Task on a Computer

▪ Computers do a much more accurate job of measuring the time it

takes participants to detect the letter colour
1. Present words are drawn in red, green or blue where the word and
the letter colours are either congruent or incongruent
2. Get subjects to press one of 3 keys depending on what the letter
colours are
▪ It should be a lot quieter to do it this way than in the original Stroop’s
experiment!

29 January 2024 Dr Hoo Keat, School of Psychology 21

 Experiment Design

▪ Note that this is an experiment because we;

▪ manipulate an independent variable (IV)
▪ measure a dependent variable (DV)

▪ For the Stroop Effect;

▪ the IV is the congruence of the letter colour and word
▪ the DV is the reaction time in reporting the letter colour

29 January 2024 Dr Hoo Keat, School of Psychology 22

 PsychoPy

www.psychopy.org

29 January
Dr Hoo
2024
Keat, School of Psychology 23
 PsychoPy

▪ We need to use software that can measure the responses and

reaction times (RTs) of the subjects

▪ For this we’re going to use PsychoPy – already installed on PCs

▪ This is free software that you can install on your own computer
(Windows, Mac or Linux), by downloading it from www.psychopy.org

29 January 2024 Dr Hoo Keat, School of Psychology 24

 PsychoPy Basics

▪ When you first run PsychoPy, two windows will pop up;
▪ the Coder view allows you to run scripts and do simple
programming in a language called Python
▪ the Builder view allows you to create experiments visually and
then run them
▪ We will be using the Builder view most of the time, so close the
Coder view for now (you can get it back from the >View menu if
you need to)

29 January 2024 Dr Hoo Keat, School of Psychology 25

 Hands-on experience: Test yourself!

▪ Download the Stroop experiments files (from Moodle) and save

these on your desktop. Make sure you know where you saved it!
1. open the Stroop experiment in PsychoPy
2. go to the Builder view, then >File>Open…
3. navigate to where you just saved the exp
4. open it (alternatively double click the file stroop.psyexp)
▪ either press the green button with the running man
▪ or press Ctrl-R
▪ When asked for the participant ID, type in your student ID number

29 January 2024 Dr Hoo Keat, School of Psychology 26

 Analysing Data with Microsoft Excel

- Filtering, Averaging, etc.

29 January 2024 Dr Hoo Keat, School of Psychology 27

 So, what have we got?

▪ PsychoPy saves several data files for different uses:

▪ A Microsoft Excel (spreadsheet) file that you can use for most analyses
▪ A ‘psydat’ file (or one for each loop in your experiment). You can’t read this
but it’s good for us to analyse with scripts
▪ A ‘log’ file that provides lots of detail but is not easy to analyse (open in excel
to have a look)
▪ To find these
▪ Go to the folder where you saved the experiment
▪ There will be a new folder inside that (next to the psyexp file) called “data”
▪ Inside the data folder will be a Microsoft Excel file named by your ID and the
date

29 January 2024 Dr Hoo Keat, School of Psychology 28

 Analysing your data with Excel

▪ Now I will walk you through the steps for analysing the group data
▪ If you’re left behind, refer to the step-by-step instruction file “Analysing Stroop
Effect on Excel.pdf”

▪ Our ultimate goals are:

▪ to calculate the mean correct RTs for both congruent and
incongruent trials
▪ to check if we manage to replicate the Stroop effect

▪ Once calculated, key in your RT scores here: Stroop 1 Data

29 January 2024 Dr Hoo Keat, School of Psychology 29

 Explaining the Stroop Effect

What are the potential causes?

29 January 2024 Dr Hoo Keat, School of Psychology 30

 What causes the Stroop effect?

❖Implications:
▪ You have to decide about colour, but there are two different colour
cues
▪ Presumably you were trying not to be distracted by the colour
written in the word, but it still had an effect
▪ It seems that you can’t help but read it (reading is automatic and
mandatory)
▪ Having read the word, it seems to affect the time it takes to reach
a decision about the letter colours

29 January 2024 Dr Hoo Keat, School of Psychology 31

 Theory 1: Parallel processing

▪ Parallel processor with conflicting evidence

▪ maybe we process both word and ink at the same time
▪ if the word is different to the ink, it contributes conflicting
evidence, which makes the decision harder to make
▪ then we would expect to see the reverse effect too…
29 January 2024 Dr Hoo Keat, School of Psychology 32
 Reverse Stroop Effect

▪ Do we see a reverse Stroop effect?

▪ i.e., if we try to name the word, to what extent is our decision
affected by incongruent letter colours?

▪ According to Stroop’s original paper the reverse effect didn’t occur

▪ But was this because his method was not very precise in timing?

29 January 2024 Dr Hoo Keat, School of Psychology 33

 Theory 2: Serial processing (1)

Word Identity Ink Identity Serial

decision Button Press
(fast) (slow) maker

▪ If John Stroop was correct and the effect only occurs in one
direction, we need to modify the model
▪ Perhaps the ‘decision maker’ can only process one type of
information at a time (a serial system)
▪ And maybe the reading of a word is quicker than assigning a
verbal label to a perceived colour
29 January 2024 Dr Hoo Keat, School of Psychology 34
 Theory 2: Serial processing (2)

▪ The delay could be because the decision about the ink must wait
until the word identity has been processed and removed from the
decision maker
▪ If so, we wouldn’t expect to see the reverse effect – that is, when
identifying the word, the ink colour wouldn’t interfere

29 January 2024 Dr Hoo Keat, School of Psychology 35

 Next class – Create a Reverse Stroop Experiment

▪ The reverse Stroop effect seems to be useful in separating these

two theories
▪ Let’s see whether, with a computerized version of Stroop task, we
can reveal an effect of ink colour on colour word recognition

▪ Next week, we will learn how to create and load the ‘ReverseStroop’
experiment with PsychoPy.
▪ In this version, you will be asked to respond based on the word you
read and ignore the colour it was written in

29 January 2024 Dr Hoo Keat, School of Psychology 36

 Further Reading

HALF A CENTURY OF RESEARCH ON THE STROOP EFFECT –

AN INTEGRATIVE REVIEW
Macleod, C.M.
Psychological Bulletin 109: (2) 163-203 MAR 1991
Abstract:
The literature on interference in the Stroop Color-Word Task, covering over 50 years and some
400 studies, is organized and reviewed. In so doing, a set of 18 reliable empirical findings is
isolated that must be captured by any successful theory of the Stroop effect. Existing
theoretical positions are summarized and evaluated in view of this critical evidence and the 2
major candidate theories-relative speed of processing and automaticity of reading-are found to
be wanting. It is concluded that recent theories placing the explanatory weight on parallel
processing of the irrelevant and the relevant dimensions are likely to be more successful than
are earlier theories attempting to locate a single bottleneck in attention.

29 January 2024 Dr Hoo Keat, School of Psychology 37

 Finding Journal Articles

▪ Sources from which you can search for journal articles:

▪ the references given in the recommended textbook or review article
▪ Google scholar (like google but gives for academic papers):
http://scholar.google.co.uk/
▪ Pubmed (more biological, good for neuroscience):
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/
▪ PsycINFO http://psycnet.apa.org/
▪ Web of Science
▪ University NUsearch:
https://nusearch.nottingham.edu.my/

29 January 2024 Dr Hoo Keat, School of Psychology 38

Do further reading on
the Stroop Effect.
See you next week!