moray et al

• Research uses two main methods to study auditory attention: selective attention (dichotic listening) and divided attention (dual-task technique)
• Cherry (1953) found that those who 'shadowed' a message in one ear, were unaware of the content of the message in the other ear
• Dichotic listening


  • Presenting two or more 'messages' at the same time and participants are instructed to process and respond to only one of them
• Shadowing


  • One message is fed into one ear and a different message into the other. Messages are repeated aloud as they are heard.
• Cocktail party phenomenon


  • The ability to focus one's listening attention on a single speaker among a cacophony of conversations and background noise
• Experiment 1 aimed to test Cherry's findings more rigorously, while experiments 2 and 3 aimed to investigate other factors that can affect attention in dichotic listening
• Experiment 1


  1. Participants shadowed a prose message presented to one ear while a short list of simple words was repeatedly presented to the other ear

  2. Participants were then asked to recall the content of the rejected message

  3. Participants were given a recognition test using similar material, present in neither the list nor the passage, as a control
• Experiment 2


  1. Participants shadowed ten short passages of light fiction

  2. Rejected messages were played in the other ear which were not attended to, some of which included the participant's name
• Experiment 3


  1. Participants were required to shadow one of two simultaneous dichotic messages

  2. In some of the messages, digits were added towards the end of the message either in both messages, or in one

  3. One group was told they'd be asked questions about the content of the shadowed message at the end, the other group had to remember as many numbers as they could