Moray

• The key theme is attention.
• Background

  Attention is the result of a 'limited-capacity' 'information-processing' system. Our brain (the information processing system) can only deal with so much information at one time so it has learned to be selective about what to pay attention to and what to 'tune out'. This process of tuning out most of the information that reaches our senses is called the inattentional block/ blindness.
• Background

  Selective attention is the focus of Moray's study.
• Background

  Selective attention- When people are presented with two or more simultaneous messages (one in each ear) and are instructed to process and respond to only one of them (dichotic listening).
• Background

  A shadowing task is when one message is fed into the left ear and a different message into the right (through headphones). Participants have to repeat one of these messages aloud as they hear it (shadow it).
• Background

  Shadowing tasks force participants to selectively attend to one message and reject/ ignore the other.
• Background

  The shadowing technique was first used by Cherry (1953) when he studied the cocktail party phenomenon.

  This is when we can be fully immersed in a conversation with someone and completely ignorant of everything else going around us at one moment, then hear our name in a conversation across the room and switch our attention to that conversation.

  Hearing our name breaks through the inattentional block.
• Background

  Perceptual set- telling someone to listen out for something.
• Aims

  1. To test the most basic of Cherry's findings, that participants could recall virtually nothing of the rejected message. (Does the inattentional block exist?)
• Aims

  2. To test the effect of 'affect' on the inattentional block. The term 'affect' refers to the personal relevance of the information received. Would the inattentional block be broken by using an instruction with the participant's name (thereby affecting them) in the rejected message?

  (Can information with affective meaning break through?)
• Aims

  3. To test the effect of perceptual set on the inattentional block. If we are told before hand to listen out for numbers, would they break the inattentional block if they were presented in the rejected message?

  (Can we create affective meaning?)
• Research Method

  All tasks were laboratory experiments.
• Research Method

  In all tasks, the apparatus used was a Brenell Mark IV stereophonic tape recorder modified with two amplifiers to give two independent outputs (one to each of the earpieces of a pair of headphones). (high reliability)
• Research Method

  Matching the loudness was approximate, by asking participants to say when the two messages that seemed equally loud to the experimenter were subjectively equal to them. (low reliability)
• Sample

  Participants were undergraduates and research workers of both sexes.
• Sample

  • Participant numbers were not given for Experiment 1.
• Sample

  • 12 participants took part in the experimental conditions of Experiment 2.
• Sample

  • Two groups of 14 participants were used in Experiment 3 (28 in total).
• Sample

  Before each experiment, participants were given 4 passages of prose to shadow (read aloud as they heard it) for practice.
• Sample

  All passages throughout the study were recorded by one male speaker.
• Experiment 1

  • The shadow message was a prose message/ a story.
  • The rejected message was a word list (7 words repeated 35 times).
  • 30 seconds after completing the shadow task, participants completed a recognition task of 21 words (7 from shadow task, 7 from rejected list, 7 controls).
• Experiment 1

  IV: Message type (shadow message, rejected message)

  DV: number of words recognised from each message out of 7.
• Experiment 1 Results

  • 4.9/7 words from shadowed message.
  • 1.9/7 words for rejected message.
  • 2.6/7 words for control.
• Experiment 1 Conclusion

  The inattentional block exists as information from the rejected message was no better recalled than information that was not there at all.
• Experiment 2

  • Each participant conducted 10 shadowing tasks.
  • 3 of the tasks included an instruction including the participant's name (affective) in the rejected message.
  • 3 of the tasks included a non-affective instruction (no name mentioned) in the rejected message.
  • 4 trials had no instructions in the rejected message.
  • Participants where then asked whether or not they heard the instruction.
• Experiment 2

  A repeated measures design was used.
• Experiment 2

  IV: whether the participant listens to a rejected message where instructions are preceded with their own name (affective instructions), no name (non-affective instructions) , or there are no instructions.

  DV: whether or not they heard the instruction (so swapped ears).
• Experiment 2

  Each ear was fed a different fictional passage.

  The participant shadowed the message from the right ear first.
• Experiment 2

  The sample was 12 University students or research workers of both genders.
• Experiment 2 Results

  • Affective instructions heard 20/39 times.
  • Non-affective instructions heard 4/36 times.
  • Therefore a significant difference was found.
• Experiment 2 Conclusion

  The inattentional block can be broken by meaningful information. We process the rejected message for meaning, not content.
• Experiment 3

  An independent measures design was used.
• Experiment 3

  • Group 1 was told that they would be asked questions about the shadowed message.
  • Group 2 was told to perceive numbers.
• Experiment 3

  • A different message with digits added towards the end was fed to each ear.
  • Participants shadowed one of these messages.
  • The amount of numbers recalled was tested at the end of the shadowing task.
• Experiment 3

  IV: The instructions given to participants ( told they would be asked questions about shadowed message or told to remember as many digits as possible).

  DV: Number of digits recalled.
• Experiment 3

  There were 14 participants in each group (so a total of 28).
• Experiment 3 Results

  No significant differences were found in the amount of numbers recalled in each of the conditions.

  This suggests that the numbers are not important enough (neutral information) to break through the inattentional block, even when we have been set to perceive them.
• Conclusions

  1. The inattentional block exists. Information from the rejected message was no better recalled than information that was not there at all. (2.6/7 for the control vs 1.9/7 for the rejected)
• Conclusions

  2. The inattentional block can be broken by meaningful information. This is the cocktail party phenomenon or the effect of 'affect'. We process the rejected message for meaning, not content. If it means something to us, we switch attention to it.
• Conclusions

  3. It is very difficult to make neutral information important enough to break through the inattentional block.