Moray Flashcards
What is the cocktail party effect?
Being able to focus ones auditory attention on a particular stimulus while filtering out a range of other stimuli
What was the aim of the study?
To test cherrys findings on attention more rigorously
Describe the sample
Undergraduate students and research workers of both genders at the university of oxford
Describe the procedure of experiment 1
Participants were asked to shadow a piece of prose they could hear in one ear while a list of words played in the other ear
After listening to this, participants were shown a list of 21 words. This was: 7 words from shadowed passage, 7 words from rejected messege, 7 words from neither
Participants were asked to pick out words heard in shadowed passage (prose)
What was the mean number of reconised words from each passage?
Shadowed - 4.9
Rejected - 1.9
Neither - 2.6
Describe the procedure of experiement 2
Participants shadowed ten passages of fiction
Heard attended messege in their ear and were asked to make as few mistakes as possible
All had instructions at the start of the rejected passage
6 had instructions within the rejected passage
Three had non affective cues and three had affective
Describe the sample used in the second experiment
12 undergraduate students and researchers
What were the results of the second experiment?
Affective - presented - 39 heard- 20
Non-affective - presented- 36 heard- 4
What was the procedure of experiment 3
Participants were again asked to shadow one of two simultaneous messages.
In these messeges, spoken numers were heard towards the end of the message
Group 1 was told they would be asked questions about the shadowed passage
Group 2 was told to remember as many digits as possible
What were the four conditions of the digits
presented in both shadowed and rejected messege
only in shadowed message
present only in rejected messege
not in either messege (control)
What were the results of the third experiment?
No significant difference between the number of digits recalled between group 1 and group 2
What conclusion can be drawn from the third experiment
Digits don’t break the attentional barrier
What were the overall conclusions drawn from the three experiments?
When asked to focus on one messege, the rejected message is almost unable to break the attentional barrier
Some messages (e.g. a persons name) are able to break the attentional barrier if the messege is important to that person
It is difficult to make neutral material important enough to break attentional barrier
What are some strengths and weaknesses of the study?
Standardisation
Participant variables
demand characteristics
All students
Ecological validity
