Words appear in an ink colour and the participant taps the ink colour while ignoring the word. Measures interference control; a custom word-list mode covers addiction and emotional Stroop variants.
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Include practice trials
Shown with feedback before the main task
Task parameters
Switching the version restores its published settings.
As in King et al. (2007). Red and green are hard to tell apart with red–green colour-vision deficiency.
Gray as in King et al. (2007), who do not report the shade (mid gray here). White and black are lab choices.
96 trials: 32 congruent, 32 incongruent, 32 neutral (shares are relative, e.g. 1 : 1 : 1). King et al. (2007) ran 96 trials, 32 per condition; no published version with 48 trials was found, so fewer trials are a lab choice. Pseudorandom order in the style of King et al. (2007): every ink equally often in each condition, and neither the ink nor the colour word repeats on consecutive trials.
King et al. (2007): 20.
King et al. (2007): 2000 ms.
King et al. (2007): correct, incorrect or too slow after every trial. Practice only is a lab choice.
Each trial (King et al. (2007)): fixation cross 200 ms; the word for 1500 ms, then a blank, with responses until 2000 ms after the word appears; feedback 200 ms; blank 2000 ms. A response does not shorten the trial. Practice names the colour of XXXX, with feedback, so participants learn the button positions.
About 8.5 min in all: 96 trials of about 4.4 s (about 7 min) and 20 practice trials. King et al. (2007) report about 9 minutes.
Outputs: median response time (correct trials, anticipations under 200 ms excluded) and accuracy per condition, and Stroop interference (incongruent − congruent and incongruent − neutral median time). The 200 ms anticipation cut-off is a lab choice (published alcohol Stroops use 100–400 ms). Difference scores from one short session are unreliable; aggregate across sessions.
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Simulated participant view
Words appear in an ink colour and the participant taps the ink colour while ignoring the word. Measures interference control; a custom word-list mode covers addiction and emotional Stroop variants.
No data is recorded
One large word at a time in the centre of the screen, with four colour patches in a fixed 2×2 grid as response buttons. The buttons show no words, so they add no second colour-word conflict.
Useful when a study needs a classic measure of interference control, or, with custom word lists, a measure of attentional bias toward cue words (alcohol, smoking, food or emotional words).
Not a diagnostic instrument. The classic version relies on reading, so it needs fluent readers of the app language and normal colour vision (or the colour-blind-friendly palette). The published classic version takes 7–9 minutes, which is long for repeated measurement in daily life. One session gives a noisy interference or bias score.
The classic defaults follow King et al. (2007): 96 trials (32 congruent, 32 incongruent, 32 neutral "XXXX"), 20 practice trials, a gray background, a 200 ms fixation cross, the word for 1500 ms with responses until 2000 ms after its onset, 200 ms feedback after every trial and a 2000 ms blank. No published version with 48 trials was found; a shorter task is a lab choice and should be reported as one. The word-list defaults follow Spanakis et al. (2019), a smartphone alcohol Stroop: each word once in each ink, blocked lists with a 5 s pause, a 500 ms fixation, a 3000 ms time limit and a 500 ms blank; the block order is counterbalanced across participants as in Albery et al. (2015). Match cue and neutral words on length and frequency.
A positive interference score means that incongruent words slowed colour naming. A positive attentional bias means that cue words slowed colour naming more than neutral words, which is read as attention captured by the cue content. Difference scores from one short session are unreliable; aggregate across sessions or model the trial-level data. The 200 ms anticipation cut-off is a lab choice; published alcohol Stroops use 100–400 ms.
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