Investigation of the Stroop Effect in a Virtual Reality Environment

Abstract

Human cognitive behavior is an exciting subject to study. In this work, the Stroop effect is investigated. The classical Stroop effect arises as a consequence of cognitive interference due to mismatch of the written color name and the actual text color. The purpose of this study is to investigate the Stroop effect and Reverse Stroop in the virtual reality environment by considering response, error, and subjective selection. An interactive application using virtual reality technology with Unreal Engine implemented using instruction-based Stroop and reversed Stroop tasks. In the designed test, participants need to throw a cube-shaped object into three specific zones according to instructions. The instructions depend on the color ( represents Stroop Test ) or the meaning of the words (represents reversed Stroop test). The instructions using either congruent or incongruent (“blue” displayed in red or green) color stimuli. Participants took more time to respond to the Stroop test than the reverse Stroop test. The result shows that Stroop and reversed Stroop replicates in virtual reality. Moreover, the result shows that subjective difficulty may affect the Stroop phenomenon in Virtual Reality.