Marcora and his colleagues tested this idea in an experiment in 2014, using a technique called the Stroop task to tax their subjects’ response inhibition. The task involves words flashing on a screen in various colors; you have to press a particular button in response to each color. What’s tricky is that the words themselves are colors: you might see the word green in blue letters, and you have to overcome your initial impulse to press the button corresponding to green instead of blue. In the study, subjects performed the task twice: once with the words and colors mismatched, requiring
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