Were you talking to me?

Too many times have we all been in a room filled with people conversing with one another, when suddenly we are deterred from our current topic and our attention is directed all the way across the room when we hear our name, by the time we refocus our attention to the original topic we most likely can’t recall the topic. This attentional ability has been termed the cocktail party effect. This phenomenon gives us the ability to focus our listening attention on a single talker among a cacophony of conversations or background noise.

It is possible our brains are wired to favor some auditory cues over others however understanding why humans are so remarkably good at using this ability is extremely difficult. Colin Cherry carried out a study to demonstrate our ability to separate one conversation from another. Cherry used the method of playing back two different messages at the same time to people, under different conditions. In the first set he played two different messages voiced by the same person and had his participants shadow one of the messages out loud and then write it down. Results showed this task to be very hard but still possible until both messages were nonsensical. The second set cherry played one message in one ear and one in the other, and both messages were still voiced by the same speaker. Recall for this study participants found much easier. This also shows that if someone in front of you is directly talking to you, and you are listening across the room that you will remember very little of the conversation directly spoken to you. In one other study, two-thirds or people don’t even notice when their name is pulled into an unattended conversation, while those that do notice their name across a room can become extremely distractible.

Could this also happen when you’re driving down the road with an early morning talk show on, most of what they’re discussing goes in one ear and out the other and is not doing a great job holding your attention until some sort of promiscuous word comes across the radio, suddenly you catch that word among all of the rest.

 

Goldstein, E. B. (2011) Cognitive Psychology Connecting Mind, Research, and Everyday Experience 3rd Edition. Belmont, CA: Wadsworth Cengage Learning.

Arons, B. (2002) A Review of The Cocktail Party Effect http://xenia.media.mit.edu/~barons/html/cocktail.html Cambridge, MA: MIT Media Lab

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