Stroop Color Word Game

About Color Clash

Color Clash is a game version of the Stroop test, one of the most famous experiments in psychology. A colour word such as BLUE appears in the middle of the screen, printed in a colour of ink that may or may not match. Your task is to tap the button for the colour of the ink, ignoring what the word says. A round has eight words, and you are timed.

On the first levels there are four colours, and about four in ten words are matching, which gives you some easy trials. From level 6 there are six colours, and at the highest level only one word in ten matches, so almost every word is a trap. Your accuracy counts, and so does your speed, which is where the real challenge lies.

How to play

1. Look at the colour of the letters, not at the meaning of the word.
2. Tap the button with the name of that colour. On a keyboard, press the number next to the button.
3. After each answer the next word follows at once. A round has eight words in total.
4. The result shows how many you got right and your average reaction time.

A colour word appears in a different colour of ink. Tap the button for the colour of the INK, not the word. Eight words per round, speed counts.

How scoring works

The score is the share of correct answers multiplied by a speed factor. The speed factor is 1 when your average reaction time is below 30 percent of a reference time and falls linearly to a minimum of 0.4 for slower answers. The reference time is 3.0 seconds on level 1 and 1.8 seconds on level 10, so you need an average of about 0.9 seconds on level 1 and 0.54 seconds on level 10 to avoid any penalty.

The share of matching words falls from 40 percent on level 1 to 10 percent on level 10. There are 4 colours up to level 5 and 6 colours from level 6. The round has an overall time limit of 30 seconds on level 1 and 22 seconds on level 10. Words that are not answered in time count as wrong.

What it trains

The game trains selective attention and inhibition: the ability to focus on one feature and block out a more automatic one. Reading is so practised that the meaning of a word is processed without effort, so it has to be suppressed.

The same skill is needed to ignore a distraction while you work, to avoid a habitual action, and to resist an automatic answer, such as saying 'fine' to 'how are you'.

Tips for a higher score

• Look at the word as if it were a coloured shape. Some players find that blurring the eyes a little or looking at the first letter helps.
• Say the ink colour silently before you look for the button. This keeps the answer in the right channel.
• Do not slow down for the matching words. They are the easy ones, so keep up the pace.
• Use the keyboard on a computer: pressing a number is faster than moving a mouse.
• If you make an error, move on at once. Dwelling on it costs time for the next word.

The idea behind it

The effect is named after John Ridley Stroop, who published it in 1935. He found that people name the ink colour of a word more slowly when the word is a different colour name than when the ink matches or when the item is a simple coloured patch. The delay is typically about 100 milliseconds or more per item.

Researchers explain it by the fact that reading is automatic and competes with colour naming, so the brain needs extra control to select the right response. The Stroop test is one of the most widely used measures of cognitive control in psychology, and the interference effect is among the most reliable findings in the field.

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Free, no account. Your best scores are saved on your device.