Abstract

K.S.

The purpose of this experiment was to determine if gender affects visual selective attention. This was tested using the Stroop effect, a task that shows that people take much longer to say the color of a stimulus when it is used in printing an inappropriate color name, rather than if it appears as a simple solid block of color. The hypothesis of this experiment was that gender would not have an effect on visual selective attention.

To conduct the experiment, first, the necessary materials were gathered. The markers were used to color rows of written names of different colors, which were drawn by stencils on the poster board. The markers were used to do this on the poster board. Individually, the twenty male subjects were taken to a quiet place and directed to say the colors they saw, one by one, on the rows of words, ignoring the meaning of the words. This was timed with the stopwatch and recorded. If a mistake was made, correction of the mistake was prompted by the instructor, the correction was made by the subject, then the experiment continued. This was included in the timing process. This process was repeated with the twenty female subjects. All gathered data was recorded.

Contrary to my hypothesis that gender would not have an effect on visual selective attention, gender did have an effect on visual selective attention. The average time of the twenty female subjects was about 35.67 seconds compared to the average time of the twenty male subjects, which was 46.9 seconds.