Okay, I admit that this is a somewhat lazy post. I’m still farily wrapped up in the Gordon Conference on Visualization, so you could interpret this as a less than stellar edition. My apologies. But after a day of more organic chemistry than I thought I could bear, I need to take a break!

So today’s post concerns a perennial favorite, the Stroop Effect, which is the cognitive delay that occurs when you try to read a color name printed in a different color—e.g., green or blue. (The above image comes from a Taiwanese web page about the effect, and I just found it rather amusing compared to the more obvious choice of listing words in English. “Look, ma, no stroop!”) Anyway, one of my fellow attendees pointed out that the Neuroscience For Kids site hosts a spiffy Stroop Effect Java Interactive that allows you to time yourself in reading off color names. Great stuff!

BTW, you can read Stroop’s original paper, if you’re interested, too.

And I’ll end with a shout out to the folks at GalaxyGoo! I show up in Kristin’s blog for today, so y’all can consider this just a wee bit of blogrolling…

Oh, and you can also listen to my podcast from the conference, hosted on the CalAcademy website.