PSYB57H3 Chapter Notes - Chapter 3: Colin Cherry, Cocktail Party, Speech Shadowing
Document Summary
Early research on attention was driven by practical problems experienced by armed forces personnel. One of those problems arose in communication centers, where many different streams of speech reached the person at the same time . In other words, they were good at selective attention: attending to relevant information and ignoring irrelevant information. Early information-processing theories suggests that people must filter out information they don"t wish to attend to. Thus one of the stages of information-processing might involve a filter that would admit some messages and block others. Filter: a hypothetical mechanism that would admit certain messages and block others. Neisser"s study used a visual analogue of dichotic listening called selective looking. Selective looking: occurs when we are exposed to 2 events simultaneously, but attend to only one of them. The studies of dichotic listening and selective looking both produce results consistent with early selection view of attention. Early selection: the hypothesis that attention prevents early perceptual processing of distractors.
