Paper 2 - Moray on Auditory Attention Flashcards
What is the background of this study ?
previous research by Cherry found that pps had no recall of the contents of the message recieved by the ‘rejected’ ear, but they were aware of physical features like the gender of the speaker.
what is shadowing ?
playing 2 messages at the same time to a different ear and only paying attention to one of them, e.g. repeating them.
what is the aim of experiment 1 ?
test Cherry’s original results more rigorously
what is the aim of experiment 2 ?
to see if some kinds of messages ( hearing your name ) break through the attentional block to the rejected ear
what is the aim of experiment 3
to see if expectations might affect the way the message to the rejected ear is processed
what is the method design of expriment 1 ?
lab experiment
repeated measures design
iv - the message played to the shadowed ear and the rejected ear ( a prose passage and a simple word list)
dv - recall of words in the rejected message
what was the method design for experiment 2
lab experiment
repeated measures design
iv - effect of affective vs non affective messages (affective message contains a person’s name)
dv - number of affective instructions that the pps responded to
what was the method design for experiment 3 ?
lab experiment
independent measures design
iv - whether digits were inserted into one or two messages. And whether participants were told that they’d be asked questions about the shadowed message or told to remember the digits they recalled.
dv - number of digits recalled.
what was the sample ?
pps were male and female undergraduates or research workers.
12 pps in experiment 2 and 14 in experiment 3.
what were the materials ?
two tape recorders were used to play the messages in a steady monotone by a male speaker
the loudness was aprox 60 decibles above the pps threshold
what was the procedure of experiment 1 ?
a passe was played to the shadowed ear and a short list of simple words was presented 35 times to the rejected ear.
recall of the rejected message was tested immediately after hearing the list using free recall.
within 30 seconds the pps were given a recognition test of similar material that was not in the list or passage - control condition.
what was the procedure of experiment 2 ?
pps had to shadow 10 passages played to their right ear while another passage was played to the rejected left ear. they were told to try and not listen to the rejcted ear.
shadowed right ear: at the beginning of each passage there were instructions either ‘listen to your right ear’ or ‘listen to your right ear; you will recieve instructions to change ears’. the second message created expectations for further messages.
rejected ear: in the middle of 6 passages there were interloped messaged played and were distributed at random. 3 of these contained the pps name ‘affective message’.
what was the procedure of experiment 3
pps were asked to shadow one of two simultaneous messages.
digits were interloped towards the end of the messages, these were sometimes present in both, one, or neither messages. the position of the numbers were varied randomly.
group 1 were told they would be asked questions about the shadowed content. Group 2 were told to remember all the digits they could
what were the results of experiment 1 ?
a mean of 4.9 words out of 7 from the shadowed ear were recognised in the final recognition test
a mean of 1.9 words out of 7 from the rejected ear were recognised
a mean of 2.6 words out of 7 were recognised from the control list
what were the results from experiment 2 ?
pps attended to more of the instructions from the affective messages than the non affective messages to the rejected ear
20 out of 39 affective messages were responded to compared with 4 out of 39 non affective messages.
a t-test showed that this was highly significant p<0.01
