PSYB57H3 Lecture Notes - Lecture 4: Cocktail Party, Resource Depletion, Inattentional Blindness
Document Summary
Attention does not have a concrete definition, rather it has a variety of meanings. Selective attention: attending to relevant information and ignoring irrelevant information. Dichotic listening: an experimental technique used to test selective attention. Participants are presented with two verbal messages simultaneously (one to each ear) and are asked to attend to only one of them. Participants are then asked to respond to a series of questions about what they heard, often about the message played to the unattended ear. Cocktail party phenomenon: the ability to attend to one conversation when many other conversations are going on. This phenomenon was studied using a shadowing task. Shadowing task: task in which the subject is given two messages, one in each ear simultaneously and must repeat one of them. The participants shadow one of the two messages by repeating it as they hear it.
