Attention and the Cocktail party effect: WACE Year 12 Psychology Unit 3

What this dot point is asking

The syllabus names selective attention, divided attention and Cherry (1953). Questions ask you to define the terms, name the researcher and year of the Cocktail party effect study, and explain how the findings relate to selective attention and to memory.

Attention and memory

Attention is the process of focusing on some stimuli while ignoring others. It has limited capacity. In the multi-store model, attention is the gateway between the sensory register and short-term memory: unattended information decays from the sensory register within seconds and is never encoded. The more attention a task receives, the more fully it is processed and the more likely it is to be stored in long-term memory.

Selective attention

Selective attention is focusing on one particular stimulus or task while filtering out competing stimuli. It lets us cope with the huge amount of sensory information arriving at once. A student reading in a noisy library, or a netballer tracking the ball while ignoring the crowd, is using selective attention.

Divided attention

Divided attention is attending to two or more stimuli or tasks at the same time. Because attention is limited, dividing it usually lowers performance on at least one task. Divided attention works best when:

• one task is well practised or automatic (walking while talking);
• the tasks use different senses or types of processing;
• the tasks are simple.

It works worst when tasks are complex, new or similar, such as listening to a lecture while reading a text message.

The Cocktail party effect (Cherry, 1953)

Colin Cherry's research gave its name to the Cocktail party effect: our ability to focus on one conversation in a crowded, noisy room while filtering out the others.

How he studied it. Cherry used dichotic listening: participants wore headphones and heard a different message in each ear at the same time. They were asked to shadow one message, repeating it aloud word for word, which forced them to attend to that ear. Afterwards they were asked about the message in the other, unattended ear.

What he found.

• Participants could report almost nothing about the content of the unattended message.
• They did not notice when the unattended message switched to another language or was played backwards.
• They did notice physical changes, such as the voice changing from male to female, or a tone replacing speech.

What it shows. Selective attention works like a filter. The attended message is processed for meaning, while unattended messages are processed only for basic physical features, so their content is not encoded into memory. Later researchers found that some meaningful information, such as your own name, can break through the filter, which is why you notice your name across a noisy room.