cognitive area ( moray) Flashcards
background
if you are having a conversation with one person then you probably wont hear what other people around you are saying
Colin Cherry created a dichotic listening task (playing two messages to participants at the same time– one in each ear) and asked participants to repeat out loud (shadow) one message
He found that participants failed to notice details of the unattended message
aim
to replicate cherry’s findings and provide evidence for the cocktail party effect in a more rigorous scientific way
sample
undergraduate students and research workers of both genders at oxford university
procedure
In this study, there were 3 experiments.
All of the experiments were dichotic listening tasks (participants listened to two different messages, one in their right ear and another in their left ear).
The messages were passages of prose that were read by the same voice (a male speaker)
Participants always had to shadow (i.e. verbally repeat) one of the messages.
experiment 1
Participants had to shadow a piece of prose that they could hear in one ear. This is the attended message because participants were focusing on it.
In the other ear (the message that they were NOT paying attention to) was a list of simple words was repeated 35 times. This is the rejected message.
At the end of the task, participants completed a recognition task.
the recognition task
After participants had completed the dichotic listening task, they were shown a list of 21 words.
Unknown to them, the words were split into 3 categories.
7 were from the passage they had shadowed.
7 were from the rejected message.
7 were words that appeared in neither passage but were similar to the other words.
Participants looked at the list of 21 words and chose which words they recognised.
conclusions
Participants were much more able to recognise words from the shadowed passage. Almost none of the words from the rejected message were able to break the ‘inattentional barrier’.
experiment 2 aims pg 11
