It is not easy to learn how to read. Children take several years to master this strange act where scribbled marks on a page are interpreted as language. But almost everyone who has read their way to this point has been practicing reading for many years. Skills that are highly practiced become automatic and can be carried out with little or no mental effort. As adults, we have practiced reading for so long that it is hard NOT to read a word that we look at.

This is called the Stroop effect or the Stroop task named after J. R. Stroop, who developed the experiments based on this task in the 1930s. With the Stroop task, you are confronted with an interference situation: on the one hand, the word spells out a particular color, such as red; on the other hand, the color of the word is a color such as green. Since reading is so highly practiced, it is hard to suppress the spelled-out word and report the color name.

On the following page, we present an experiment that makes use of the Stroop effect. In the Demo mode the test walks the subject through three examples of each of the six tests. When the tests are complete, the subject can have the results e-mailed to any valid e-mail address. In the Research mode we allow the researcher to set up parameters and then use the same parameters for any number of subjects. When the subject completes the final series of tests, they are presented with a "Thank You" screen instructing them to contact their moderator. The moderator can then press the [c] key ("c" for Continue) and is presented with options to e-mail the results of this test, run the tests again with the same parameters, or change the parameters.