Background: Stroop test is one of the widely used tests in cognitive psychology. It is used both in healthy population and also in patients to assess the selective attention. The selective attention as assessed by it is also found to be altered in bilinguals. In Nepal, most of the students are bilingual since most of the courses are in English language. Thus, they learn English language along with their native languages. This study is aimed to assess the selective attention in healthy Nepalese medical students.
Objective: To study the reaction time in stroop test in medical students of Nepal.
Materials and methods: This study was conducted on 30 healthy male students aged 23.1±2.8 yrs. They were asked to read congruent (red printed in red ink) and incongruent (red printed in blue ink) tests in classical stroop cards. The reaction times for both the tests were calculated. Median with inter-quartile range was obtained for reaction time. Wilcoxon's Sign Rank Test was used to compare reaction time and errors between congruent and incongruent cards.
Results: The subjects took 82.10 (63.75-107.76) sec longer to read incongruent stroop test (p<0.001). The error made was 0 in congruent stroop test and 1.5 (0-3) in incongruent stroop test (p<0.001). No students made error in the congruent test but 60% (18) of students made error in incongruent test (p<.001) and interference percentage in incongruent was 157 (115.32-213.50)%.
Conclusion: The reaction time and interferences were more in incongruent stroop test than congruent test. The interference was very high than that of previous literature's value. This indicates that Nepalese students have delayed attention while performing classical English version of stroop test.
Keywords: Delayed reaction time; Nepalese medical students; Stroop test.