The Stroop test measures focus under conflict. A colour word appears in a coloured font, and you decide as fast as you can whether the word matches the colour it is shown in. It is based on the classic Stroop effect.
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A colour word — say BLUE — appears printed in some colour of ink. Your job: decide as fast as you can whether the word matches the ink it's printed in. Sounds trivial, and that's the trap. When the word and the ink disagree, your brain reads the word before it sees the colour, and suppressing that automatic reading costs you real, measurable milliseconds. That interference is the famous Stroop effect, first measured in the 1930s and still a staple of psychology labs today.
You have 60 seconds; your score is how many correct match/no-match calls you make. Wrong answers waste time, so accuracy and speed pull against each other — exactly the tension the test is designed to create. Turn up the number of colours in settings and the conflicts come in more varieties.
The skill being trained is selective attention — deliberately attending to one attribute (ink colour) while ignoring a louder one (the word). Two habits help: soften your gaze so the word is less "readable," and settle into a steady answer rhythm rather than lurching between bursts and freezes. Scores also dip when you're tired or distracted, which is why researchers use tests like this to probe attention itself. The history and science are in our What is the Stroop effect? guide.
Around 20 correct calls in 60 seconds is typical; past 30 with high accuracy is sharp. It varies with the number of colours you enable.
Reading is automatic for literate adults — you can't not read the word. The test measures the cost of overriding that reflex.
Psychologists use variants to study attention and cognitive control. Ours is the fun kind — a 60-second focus workout, not a diagnosis.