The topic of the planned research will be how the Stroop effect is related to age and gender. The Stroop effect refers to the delay in the response time, which is measured using the Stroop test. In general, the Stroop test is a set of color words printed with the ink of different colors. Participants are asked to read the words and to name the color in which they are printed. The test is used to assess individuals’ cognitive functions, including inhibition and selective attention (Datta et al., 2020). The purpose of this research will be to investigate whether there is a correlation between the Stroop effect and age and whether there is a difference in the Stroop task performance between men and women. Further, the findings from the extant literature will be summarized, and the research hypotheses based on these findings will be stated.
Various researchers explored the relationship between individuals’ age and their performance in the Stroop test. For example, Gajewski et al. (2020) compared the Stroop task performance in younger adults, middle-aged people, and older adults and found out the correlation between the individuals’ age and their Stroop task performance. According to their findings, the older people got, the worse results they received in the Stroop test (Gajewski et al., 2020). Older adults tended to demonstrate slower response and reduced response accuracy than their younger counterparts did (Gajewski et al., 2020). These results are attributed to various morphological, structural, and functional changes that occur in the brain as a person ages (Gajewski et al., 2020). However, the researchers also discovered that some older adults performed at the level of middle-aged people; these individuals were distinguished by higher levels of education, IQ, and physical health (Gajewski et al., 2020). Based on these findings, it is hypothesized that older people will have a higher reaction time in different Stroop tasks than their younger counterparts.
The literature also allows for making predictions regarding the differences in the Stroop task performance between male and female participants. The study conducted by Datta et al. (2020) aimed to investigate whether there were gender differences in the performance in the Stroop test. The researchers found that female participants demonstrated significantly shorter reaction time in the Stroop test than their male counterparts (Datta et al., 2020). This difference in the Stroop task performance is attributed to biological differences between men and women, namely, larger areas of planum temporale and callosum and smaller head size in females (Datta et al., 2020). Given these research findings, it is hypothesized that there will be a significant difference in the response time between men and women.
The data will be analyzed using a t-test and the Pearson correlation coefficient. In order to test the hypothesis that there is a difference in the Stroop Task performance between men and women, an independent samples t-test will be used. This type of statistical data analysis is appropriate for comparing the means for two distinct groups, which will be males and females in the given case. In addition, the t-test is suited for analyzing small sets of data. Since the research sample will be about 50 participants, the t-test seems to be appropriate. The Pearson correlation coefficient will be used to test the hypothesis that there is a correlation between the individuals’ age and their response time in the Stroop test.
References
Datta, K., Nebhinani, N., & Dixit, A. (2020). Gender differences in performance on Hindi – English Stroop task. The Indian Journal of Physiology and Pharmacology, 64(1), 45-49.
Gajewski, P. D., Falkenstein, M., Thones, S., & Wascher, E. (2020). Stroop task performance across the lifespan: High cognitive reserve in older age is associated with enhanced proactive and reactive interference control. NeuroImage, 207, 116430. Web.