Animal Stroop
Audio Variant
What is this?
See an animal name while hearing a different animal sound. Identify the word you see. This variant combines visual and auditory channels to create cross-modal interference, testing how well you can focus on one sensory modality while ignoring conflicting information from another.
What does it measure?
Audio-visual cross-modal interference. This measures your ability to selectively attend to visual information while suppressing automatic auditory processing. It reveals how strongly auditory input can capture attention and interfere with a visual task, even when you know the sound is irrelevant.
How it works
- 1An animal name appears on screen while an animal sound plays simultaneously.
- 2Read the WORD you see, ignoring the sound you hear.
- 3For example, if you see "CAT" while hearing a dog bark, the answer is cat.
- 4Respond as quickly and accurately as possible for each trial.
Fun fact
This variant demonstrates that interference can cross between visual and auditory modalities, similar to the McGurk effect. The McGurk effect shows that what we see can change what we hear — and the Animal Stroop shows that what we hear can interfere with processing what we see.