The way to get fascinated with cognitive psychology is to see it at work. I have developed some lessons to enable students to do various experiments and demonstrations themselves. You can access these free of charge via the PsyToolkit website: http://psytoolkit.gla.ac.uk. They include the experiments described here. These two tasks seem simple when you read about them, but are surprisingly difficult for participants. It is this clash between expectations and what is actually going on that draws me to cognitive psychology.
One of the classics of psychological research is the Stroop task. This task, named after the American psychologist John Ridley Stroop, was published in the 1930s. The Stroop task is relatively simple to under-stand but really hard to do. Participants need to name the ink colour of words. This in itself is a relatively simple task that most people can do without any further training.
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