Moray

• Background


  • attention is a limited resource. when our attention is focused on certain things, a barrier is put up that stops us from focusing on other things
  • Cherry, in 1953 was interested in how people put up an inattention barrier at a party with multiple conversations going on
  • this is where you only listen to the conversation you're participating in and not the conversations around you
  • the cocktail party effect is when the barrier can be broken only by the sound of your name
• aim


  • to test Cherry's findings on the inattentional barrier more thoroughly
  • to find out if an affective cue would break the inattentional barrier
  • to find out if pre-warning would help neutral material break the inattentional barrier
• sample


  1. undergraduate students, male and female from Oxford university
  2. 12 undergraduate students, male and female from Oxford university
  3. 28 undergraduate students, male and female from Oxford university, split into 2 groups of 14
• procedure of experiment 1


  • participants had to shadow a piece of prose that they could hear in one ear. this is the attended message because participants were focusing on it
  • in the other ear a list of simple words was repeated 35 times. this is the rejected message
  • at the end of the task, participants completed a recognition task. participants had to indicate what they recognised from a list of 21 words
• procedure of experiment 2


  • participants heard 10 passages of light fiction including both affective and non-affective instructions
  • participants were told to either change ear or to stop. they were told to make as few errors as possible
  • the instructions were at the start and/or end of the passage
  • passages were read at a steady monotone with a pace of 130 words per minute by a single male voice
• procedure of experiment 3


  • participants were asked to shadow one message
  • the message sometimes contained digits towards the end
  • the digits were sometimes only in the shadowed passage, sometimes only in the rejected passage, sometimes in both and sometimes there were no digits
• findings of experiment 1


  • participants recognised 4.9/7 words on average from the shadowed passage
  • participants recognised 1.9/7 words on average from the rejected passage
  • participants recognised 2.6/7 words on average that were inneither passage
• findings of experiment 2


  • participants heard/followed the instructions preceded by their name 20/39 times
  • participants heard/followed the instructions not preceded by their name 20/36 times
• findings of experiment 3


  • there was no significant difference between the groups in how many digits they were able to recall from the rejected passage
• conclusions of experiment 1


  • participants are much more able to recognise words from the shadowed passage
  • almost none of the words from the rejected message are able to break the inattentional barrier
• conclusions of experiment 2


  • affective messages such as names are able to break the inattentional barrier
  • this backs up the previous works by cherry
• conclusions of experiment 3


  • warnings do not help neutral information break the inattentional narrier
  • the information must be meaningful in order to do this
• overall conclusions


  • almost none of the verbal content from a rejected message penetrates a block when attending to another message
  • 'important' messages like names can penetrate the barrier
  • a short list of simple words cannot be remembered even when repeated several times
  • it is difficult to make 'neutral' material important enough to break the inattentional barrier
• links to the area

  • investigated auditory attention and showed we are unable to process information we are not attending to unless it is meaningful to us
  • participants failed to notice information in the rejected message, unless their name was used