Moray

• Selective attention is when people are presented with simultaneous stimuli and only pay attention to one and reject the other.
• Broadbent investigated the aviation industry and how air traffic controllers are able to selectively pay attention to important messages while rejecting others.
• Cherry investigated the cocktail party phenomenon and found people are able to pay attention to their conversation while also divert their attention when they hear their name.
• Cherry created dichotic listening tasks where participants listen to a message per ear and reject one while shadowing the other. He found that very little could be remembered from the rejected message. Moray wanted to expand on this research and extend knowledge of selective attention.
• Moray aimed to test dichotic listening in relation to:

  • the amount of information recognised in the rejected message,
  • the effect of hearing ones own name in the rejected message,
  • the effect of instructions to identify a specific target in the rejected message.
• Moray had a sample for each experiment:

  • male and female undergraduates and research workers (unknown amount),
  • 12 male and female undergraduates and research workers,
  • 14 male and female undergraduates and research workers.
• All 3 experiments were lab experiments:

  1. Repeated measures design - to measure the number of words correctly recognised in the rejected message,
  2. Repeated measures design - to measure the number of affective instructions followed depending on if they used their name,
  3. Independent measures design - measured number of digits recalled depending on whether they were given instructions to listen for the numbers.
• Experiment 1 procedure:

  • A short list of words were spoken 35 times as the rejected message for the participants to ignore,
  • Participants were asked to shadow (repeat out loud) prose in their other ear,
  • They used stereophonic tape recorder to play the message at the same volume and the same time as both ears,
  • 30 seconds after the dichotic listening task participants were given a recognition task of 21 words (7 from rejected, 7 from shadowed, and 7 as a control).
• Experiment 2 procedure:

  • Participants heard 2 passages of prose (total 10 trails) at the same time, one in each ear,
  • The passages began with an instruction to listen to the right ear and in 2 conditions the participant was warned they would be told to change ears,
  • The instructions were either affective (in 3 cases), non affective (in 3 cases) or no instruction (in 4 cases).
• Experiment 3 procedure:

  • Instructions were given to participants, some were told to listen out for digits and others were not told this,
  • They then had to complete a dichotic listening task.
• Moray found that:

  • Significantly more words remembered in the shadowed message (4.9/7) than rejected message (1.9/7),
  • 20/39 messages heard with affective instructions compared to 4/36 messages heard with non-affective instructions,
  • No significant differences between number of digits recalled in either condition.
• Moray concluded that when one message is shadowed and the other is rejected, almost no information is able to penetrate the attention block.

  The frequency of messages heard in the rejected message was increased when affective instructions were given, however Moray thought the instruction itself could've been what broke the block instead of the name (affective cue).

  Information with no meaning is not able to break the block set up by the rejected message.