Brain break · Stroop task

Say the Color

The word says RED. The word is printed in green. Pick green — and notice how hard your brain works to stop you.

Before you start

Pick the COLOUR the word is printed in. Ignore what the word says.

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You can leave halfway. It still counts and you still keep the pearls.

About Say the Color

Say the Color is the Stroop task, which is probably the most famous experiment in psychology that you can also do in a minute. A colour word appears printed in a different colour — the word RED, in green ink — and you have to name the ink and ignore the word. Your brain will fight you the whole way, and that fight is the measurement.

It works because reading is automatic in a way that colour-naming is not. By the time you have looked at the word, you have already read it, whether you wanted to or not. Overriding that costs you time — usually somewhere between fifty and three hundred milliseconds — and that gap is called the Stroop effect. Everybody has one. A large one is not a defect.

Your results screen shows exactly this: how fast you were when the word and the colour agreed, versus when they fought. That comparison is the honest signal. The raw score out of twenty depends far too much on your device, your mouse, and how much coffee you have had.

There is a Chaos version if you want it, where the rule reverses halfway through and you suddenly have to pick the word instead. It is genuinely annoying, which is the point — it adds a rule-switch on top of the conflict and makes the second half feel like a completely different task.

What this will and will not do. Repeating it will shrink your Stroop effect on this page. Blinded research on computerised cognitive training in ADHD found no improvement in interference control transferring anywhere else, so we are not going to claim it will make you less distractible at work. Use it as a warm-up before the thing you are avoiding.

One deliberate design note: the answer buttons are plain black text on white. Colouring them would let you match colour to colour without ever resolving the conflict, and the task would quietly stop being a Stroop task at all.

How it works

  1. 1Read the instruction, not the word. The prompt above the card tells you what to pick — normally the colour the text is printed in.
  2. 2Pick from the five buttons. Red, Blue, Green, Yellow, Purple. The buttons stay plain on purpose, so you can't shortcut the conflict.
  3. 3Wrong picks just flash. A red border, then straight on to the next round. Nothing resets and nothing ends.
  4. 4Try Chaos if you're brave. Halfway through, the rule flips and you have to pick the word instead of the colour. You get a warning. It does not help much.

The Stroop effect — questions people ask

What is the Stroop effect?
The delay you experience when naming the colour of a word that spells a different colour — for example the word RED printed in green. Reading is automatic, so you have to override it, and that override costs time. It was first described by John Ridley Stroop in 1935 and is one of the most replicated findings in psychology.
Is the Stroop test a test for ADHD?
No. It is not a diagnostic instrument, and a browser version even less so. Performance varies with your device, your input method, tiredness and practice. If attention difficulties are affecting your daily life, speak with a qualified clinician.
Do people with ADHD do worse on the Stroop test?
Group studies often find slightly larger interference effects on average in ADHD, but the overlap between groups is enormous — plenty of people without ADHD show a large effect and plenty with ADHD show a small one. An individual score tells you essentially nothing on its own.
Does practising the Stroop task improve focus?
Not in any way that has been shown to transfer. You will get faster at this task. Blinded trials of cognitive training in ADHD found no improvement in interference control outside the trained task, so we make no claim beyond 'it is a decent sixty-second warm-up'.
What is a good Stroop score?
The number worth watching is your conflict cost — how much slower you were when the word disagreed with the colour — compared with your own earlier runs. The raw score out of twenty is too dependent on your setup to compare with anyone else.
Why aren't the answer buttons coloured?
Because you could then match colour to colour visually and never resolve the conflict at all. Plain buttons keep it a Stroop task.
What is Chaos mode?
A 20-round run where the instruction reverses at the halfway point — you switch from naming the colour to naming the word. It stacks a rule-switch on top of the interference, and it is much harder than it sounds.

Related reading & tools

Educational, not a diagnosis.This game is a relatable, educational tool — it cannot diagnose ADHD or any condition. If your symptoms are affecting your daily life, please talk with a qualified clinician.

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