[xmca] Re: When does an action begin and end?: font characteristics vsword meaning

[Helen Grimmett <helen.grimmett@education.monash.edu.au>]

Hi Emily,

Wouldn't young children find the Stroop test easier because their
reading skills are not sufficiently developed to recognise the words at
sight and therefore decoding the words demands far greater attention
from them than it does for older children or adults. For these children
it is much easier to ignore the symbolic content of the word because
working that out is harder than recognising the colour of the font.
However for 'sight readers' the symbolic content automatically pops into
your head and is much more difficult to ignore.

My 74 year old mother has just bought a Nintendo DS and Brain training
game which includes this test. She found it quite difficult at first but
has improved with practice. I'll have to borrow it and try it out on my
seven yr old son. He can certainly read the colour words but I wonder
how hard he still has to work to decode the print rather than recognise
them at sight, and therefore how much easier it is for him to ignore the
symbolic content and just pay attention to the colour?

Cheers,
Helen Grimmett 

> Date: Mon, 24 Aug 2009 09:20:17 -0700
> From: "Duvall, Emily" <emily@uidaho.edu>
> Subject: RE: [xmca] When does an action begin and end?: font
> 	characteristics	vsword meaning
> To: "eXtended Mind, Culture, Activity" <xmca@weber.ucsd.edu>
> Message-ID:
> 	<3B19033D3E2EC34C97DF364119A79A61EBB7F1@EXVS1.its.uidaho.edu>
> Content-Type: text/plain;	charset="us-ascii"
> 
> Hi Steve, 
> This is the classic Stroop test. I had some of my grad students in
> psycholinguistics use it this summer - there is a bit more to it, but
> essentially we found that younger children have less difficulty 
> (grade 2
> and below for example) than older children and that adults have the 
> mostdifficulty. This was more of a fun experiment in understanding 
> the ways
> the brain lays down its neural pathways such that, while plastic, the
> brain lays down some pretty formidable dendritic connections with 
> regardto attention. 
> http://www.snre.umich.edu/eplab/demos/st0/stroopdesc.html 
> 
> The left-brain right brain stuff feeds into neuromyths on the workings
> of the brain, by the way.
> ~em
> 
> -----Original Message-----
> From: xmca-bounces@weber.ucsd.edu [mailto:xmca-bounces@weber.ucsd.edu]
> On Behalf Of Steve Gabosch
> Sent: Monday, August 24, 2009 3:07 AM
> To: eXtended Mind, Culture, Activity
> Subject: Re: [xmca] When does an action begin and end?: font
> characteristics vsword meaning
> 
> Attached below is a chart I found on the internet some time ago that
> seems relevant to the problem discussed the other week of 
> understandingLeontiev's claim that the physical characteristics of 
> a text font can be
> relatively unconscious to a reader unless something calls specific
> attention to them.
> 
> In this chart, color words like YELLOW, BLUE, RED are printed on a 
> chartusing font colors that are different from the word.  The 
> challenge is to
> look at each word in the chart and say the **color**  
> of the font, and ignore the color **word** that the letters form.   
> Compare this challenge with doing the opposite, saying the word being
> formed, and ignoring the font color.  The latter will probably seem
> easier.
> 
> This appears to demonstrate that, for some or perhaps many, it is 
> easierto read the words and ignore the font color than it is to 
> notice the
> color of the font and ignore the word meaning.  To do the  
> latter seems to take special concentration.   Persons affected by 
> this  
> chart in this manner seem to need .  Perhaps this could be seen as a
> demonstration of Leontiev's point.  In some ways, it seems to go even
> further.
> 
> In any case, it is surprising to observe how the meaning of a **word**
> can disrupt and least some people's ability to immediately and
> consistently correctly notice and state the color of the **font** 
> (whatLeontiev calls the "outward aspect of the text").  The 
> symbolic content
> of the words seems to overshadow the physical characteristics of the
> font unless the reader makes a special effort to focus on these 
> physicalcharacteristics specifically.  The use of color in this 
> situation seems
> to exaggerate this general phenomenon.
> 
> 
> 
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> End of xmca Digest, Vol 51, Issue 57
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