moray

Question 1

background

Answer 1

if you are having conversation with someone, you probably won’t be able to hear what anyone else is saying. this is the inattentional barrier

Question 2

cocktail party effect

Answer 2

when someone can grab our attention using our name

Question 3

who coined the term cocktail party effect

Answer 3

cherry

Question 4

background of cherry

Answer 4

did a dichotic listening task and found participants failed to notice details of unattended messages

Question 5

aim of moray

Answer 5

to replicate cherry’s findings and provide evidence for the cocktail party effect in a more rigorous, scientific way

Question 6

sample

Answer 6

undergraduate students and research workers from Oxford university with both genders

Question 7

experiment one procedure

Answer 7

-participants shadow a piece of prose in one ear with headphones on
- in the other ear there was information which they should not attend to, which was a list of repeated words (35)
- at the end, they completed a recognition task

Question 8

what lists of words did they have from the recognition task

Answer 8

-7 from shadowed message
-7 from rejected message
-7 from none of the passages

Question 9

results from recognition task

Answer 9

mean number of words: 4.9 in shadowed message vs 1.9 in rejected message

Question 10

conclusion from experiment 1

Answer 10

-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’.

Question 11

aim of experiment 2

Answer 11

to see if affective instructions (i.e. using NAMES) will be strong enough to grab someone’s attention.

Question 12

sample of experiment 2

Answer 12

12 undergraduate students and research workers from oxford

Question 13

procedure in experiment 2

Answer 13

each participant completed 10 dichotic listening tasks. they had to shadow the passage in the RIGHT ear and reject the passage in the LEFT ear
-included instructions such as ‘you can stop now’ ‘change to the other ear’

Question 14

what was the dv

Answer 14

the dependent variable was whether participants heard the instructions within the rejected message.

Question 15

how was the dv measured

Answer 15

participants were recorded as having heard the passage if:
they reported hearing the instructions or
they followed the instruction

Question 16

results of experiment 2

Answer 16

number of times heard: affective instructions 20/39
non affective instructions: 4/36

Question 17

conclusion from experiment 2

Answer 17

participants were far more likely to hear instructions that were affective (personally meaningful) than non-affective

Question 18

experiment 3

Answer 18

to complete a dichotic listening task, with digits were said out loud at the end of the messages. some participants were asked to listen out for the digits

Question 19

two groups in experiment 3, what were the objectives of them both?

Answer 19

group 1 were told they were going to be asked questions about the shadowed message and group 2 were asked to remember as many digits as possible

Question 20

results from experiment 3

Answer 20

there was no significant difference in the number of digits recalled between group 1 (told they would be asked questions about the shadowed passage) and group 2 (told specifically to remember as many digits as possible).

Question 21

conclusion from experiment 3

Answer 21

neutral, non-affective information like digits cannot be made important enough to break the inattentional barrier