Moray: Attention (Cognitive)

Question 1

When was Moray’s study published?

Answer 1

1959

Question 2

What is the difference between Dichotic and binaural listening?

Answer 2

Two messaged played at once can either be arranged binaurally (both presented to both ears at the same time) or dichotically (with a different message in each ear).

Question 3

What is shadowing?

Answer 3

Participants have to repeat the message they hear. This is much more difficult when two messages are presented binaurally than when they are presented dichotically.

Question 4

What theories was Moray’s study based on?

Answer 4

-Attention has a selective nature
-Attention is the result of a limited-capacity information-processing system in which humans must ‘tune out’ what they are not paying attention to
-Serial processing theory in which information is processed one step at a time in the order it is received
-However, there was also a theory that divided attention holds that two or more operations can be carried out at the same time.

Question 5

What are the two main methods of studying attention?

Answer 5

Selective Attention- presented with 2 or more simultaneous messages and are instructed to process and respond to only one of them
Divided Attention- dual-task technique in which people are asked to attend and respond to both (or all) the messages.

Question 6

What is the background to Moray’s study?

Answer 6

-Cherry’s (1953) method of shadowing one of two dichotic messages for his study of attention in listening found participants who shadowed one message were ignorant of the content of a message simultaneously presented to the other ear. Did not notice language change but were aware of gender change.
-Moray’s first experiment aimed to test Cherry’s findings rigorously whilst the second and third aimed to investigate other factors that can affect attention in dichotic listening

Question 7

What research method was used for all 3 experiments in Moray’s study?

Answer 7

Laboratory experiment

Question 8

What was the design, IV, and DV in experiment 1 of Moray’s study?

Answer 8

-Repeated measures design
-IVs were the dichotic listening test and the recognition test
-DV was the number of words recognised correctly in the rejected message

Question 9

What was the design, IV, and DV in experiment 2 of Moray’s study?

Answer 9

-Repeated measures design
-IV was whether or not instructions were prefixed by the participant’s own name
-DV was the number of times that instruction was heard

Question 10

What was the design, IV, and DV in experiment 3 of Moray’s study?

Answer 10

-Independent measures design
-IVs were whether digits were inserted into both messages or only one and whether participants were told they would be asked questions about the content of the shadowed message and the other was told to remember all the numbers they could
-The DV was the number of digits correctly reported

Question 11

What was the sample for Moray’s study?

Answer 11

-Undergraduate students and research workers of both sexes
-No participant numbers for experiment 1, 12 in experiment 2, and two groups of 14 in experiment 3

Question 12

What did all participants do regardless of the experiment in Moray’s study?

Answer 12

Before each experiment, the participants were given 4 passages of prose to shadow for practice. All passages throughout the study were recorded by one male.

Question 13

What was the procedure of experiment 1 in Moray’s study?

Answer 13

-A short list of simple words was repeatedly presented to one of the participant’s ears whilst they shadowed a prose message presented to the other ear. The word list was faded in after shadowing had begun, and was equal in intensity to the shadowed message. Faded out at the end.
-Word list repeated 35 times
-Participant asked to report all they could of the content of the rejected message
-Then given a recognition test using similar material, present in neither the list nor the passage, as a control
The gap between the end of shadowing and the beginning of recognition task was about 30 seconds

Question 14

What was the procedure of experiment 2 in Moray’s study?

Answer 14

-Aim was to find out the limits of the efficiency of the attentional block
-Participants shadowed ten short passages of light fiction
-They were told that their responses would be recorded and their objective was to make as few mistakes as possible
-In some of the passages, instructions were interpolated, but in two instances the participants were not warned of these
-In half the cases with instructions, these were prefixed by the participant’s own name
-The passages were read in a steady monotone voice at about 130 words per minute
-Participants’ responses were tape-recorded and later analysed

Question 15

What was the procedure for experiment 3 of Moray’s study?

Answer 15

-Two groups of 14 participants shadowed one of two simultaneous dichotic messages
-In some of the messages, digits were interpolated towards the end of the message. These were either in both messages or just one. The position of the numbers in the message and relative to each other in the two messages were varied, and controls with no numbers were also used, randomly inserted
-One group was told that it would be asked questions about the content of the shadowed message at the end of each message, the other group was specifically instructed to remember all the numbers that it could.

Question 16

What were the results of experiment 1 in Moray’s study?

Answer 16

-Mean number of words recognised from the shadowed message 4.9/7; 1.9/7 from the rejected message and 2.6/7 for the first time in the recognition task.
-There was no trace of material from the rejected message being recognised
-30 second delay was unlikely to have caused the rejected material to be lost because words from early in the shadowed message were recognised.
-These findings support those found by Cherry in 1953

Question 17

What were the results of experiment 2 in Moray’s study?

Answer 17

-Most participants ignored the instruction that were presented in the passages they were shadowing and said they thought this was merely an attempt to distract them
-Affective cues heard 20/39 times whereas non-affective cues heard 4/36 times
-On only 4 out of the 20 occasions in which the ‘names’ instructions were heard did the participants actually make a change to the other message

Question 18

What were the results for experiment 3 in Moray’s study?

Answer 18

The mean number of digits reported when the participants had been told they would be asked about the content and when told specifically to listen for digit was not significantly different.

Question 19

What possible conclusions can be drawn from Moray’s study?

Answer 19

-When the participant directs attention to the message in one ear, rejecting the message in the other ear, almost all of the verbal content of the rejected message is blocked
-This rejection is apparent even when the message is repeated many times; there is no trace of a short list of simple words presented many times being remembered
-Subjectively important messages, such as one’s own name, can penetrate the block
-It is very difficult (though perhaps not impossible) to make neutral material important enough to penetrate the block

Question 20

What are the strengths and weaknesses of the research method used in Moray’s study?

Answer 20

It was possible to control extraneous variables leading to a higher validity. Participants had the loudness in each ear individually matched to ensure that differences in the messages were not caused by differences in volume, and the messages were recorded to ensure that they were spoken at a constant speed and without expression. It was also made sure the participant’s name was not stressed.

Question 21

What are strengths and weaknesses of the type of data collected in Moray’s study?

Answer 21

-Quantitative data
-Easy comparison of conditions
-No qualitative data, though this would be difficult as the participants unconsciously ignored the rejected message.

Question 22

What ethical considerations are there for Moray’s study?

Answer 22

-Few ethical issues
-Practice sessions so participants were aware of what was going to happen
-Unlikely to cause distress

Question 23

Can Moray’s study be considered valid?

Answer 23

-High level of control meant greater recall was a direct result of the IV and not of extraneous variables such as volume
-The act of shadowing is not realistic to everyday life
-Though the task of dichotic listening does represent everyday situations

Question 24

Can Moray’s study be considered reliable?

Answer 24

-Controlling variables such as volume and the use of headphones raised reliability
-However, participants did have different experiences in some ways; for example, only some heard and responded to the instruction to change ears, so the passage intended to be shadowed became the rejected message

Question 25

Was there any sampling bias in Moray’s study?

Answer 25

-No reason to suppose that students and research workers differ from the general population in relation to their selective attention skills.
-Included both male and female which was important as some studies have shown that there are differences in processing of verbal material by men and women

Question 26

Can Moray’s study be considered ethnocentric?

Answer 26

-It is possible that in different languages, words are processed in different ways
-Monolingual and bilingual speakers responded differently to a dichotic listening task in another study
-Another study found that bi- and tri-lingual speakers found listening in noisy environments more difficult than monolinguals
-However, another study found that participants fluent in both Swedish and Finnish performed better in a dichotic listening task than monolinguals
-Thus wider generalisations may not be valid

Question 27

What are practical applications in Moray’s study?

Answer 27

-The topic of attention has led to useful research in areas such as driver safety (Moray 1990)
-More recently, applications have included using direction attention to one’s own name as a test of consciousness in long-term coma patients (Cheng 2013)
-Using tests of the ability to switch attention between messages to understand children with listening, but not hearing, disorders (Dharmani 2013)