Reliability and validity analysis of color word test based on the smartphone program Stroop (Preprint)

BACKGROUND The Stroop colorword test was developed by the American psychologist John Riddly Stroop as a result of his famous color naming experiment at 1935. Generally, reading a word and telling the color of a font are two distinct cognitive processes. It is widely used in the clinical evaluation of cognitive and executive functions [2, 3], mainly including automatic processing and controlled processing, psychosis, or the cognitive interference caused by neurophysiological irregularities, the cognitive structure of selective attention, and so forth. In the traditional Stroop scale test, the participants read the colors of Chinese characters one by one from the paper cards. Many complicating factors may bias the results of the test one way or another [ 4 ]. Among these complicating factors, the skill level of testers is prominent, affecting the test–retest reliability of the scale, which is not conducive to the clinical application of the Stroop effect. OBJECTIVE This study aimed to evaluate the reliability and validity of the colorword test based on the smartphone program Stroop (C-Stroop). METHODS A total of 30 participants were selected from outpatients of the Department of Neurology of the 986th Hospital of the Air Force from December 2019 to March 2020. These participants were randomly divided into groups and subjected to either traditional Stroop colorword test (administered by a professional or nonprofessional examiner) or C-Stroop colorword test. The response time and the number of responses after completing the tasks were compared between different groups. Conclusions were drawn about the relative reliability and effectiveness of different testing methods. RESULTS (1) The KMO value of the test time was 0.860, and the KMO value of the correct number was 0.768. The analysis of the correspondence relationship between the test time and the correct number of items and factors in the scale homogeneity test showed that the correlation coefficients were both greater than 0.8 and 0.7. (2) The Cronbach’s alpha coefficient of the reliability analysis test and the correct number was 0.981 and 0.886, respectively. (3) The correlation coefficient and the P value of the time and the correct number were statistically significant. CONCLUSIONS The C-Stroop colorword test was easy to administer, and exhibited high sensitivity, good reliability, and excellent repetitiveness. It can be used to evaluate the executive function of participants in place of the traditional Stroop colorword test.