The Stroop Effect

So I have been looking up the effects the brain has on processing in my psychology book and have come across the colour/word phenomenon.

It is called the Stroop Effect and is apart of the automaticity of the brain. Which basically means something we do without thinking.  In 1935 John Ridley Stroop first published the effect, and it relies on humans performing functions so commonly, that they start to do things without thinking. It becomes automatic and we perform it without much thought or attention. This is a good thing most of the time as it free's up other parts of the mind to focus on other tasks, but it can become so automatic that when we are asked to challenge these automatic responses, it takes us longer to complete.

The Stroop Effect is specifically the colour/word combination of this automatic effect. When asked to read normal words which are not coloured, humans find this easy and are very fast. The next challenge is to read the words which are written in the correct colour to match the word. This is also extremely easy for the brain as we do this kind of thing a lot and it has become something we can perform without much thought. The tricky part comes when the colours of the words are different to the colour's written. This will take more time and often we will get confused as one part of our mind works automatically and starts to say the incorrect colour, and the other part of our brain is working against it, slowing us down.

Now, most people we talk to have done tests of this nature in email forwards, or as part of a course, but, almost all of the Stroop tests are performed using either speech, where you have to either say the colour not the word, or vise versa, or they have been click scenarios - which would be using a mouse to click on the colour not the word or vise versa. I'm interested to see whether the colours ball in the holes test I could create would continue the trend of brain automaticity - or whether when we are completing the task physically the results change?