What is the cocktail party effect?
It is the ability to attend to one conversation amid many and to notice important information, like your name, from speech you were ignoring. Colin Cherry studied it in 1953.
📌 At a glance
- Researcher
- Colin Cherry (1953)
- Methods
- Dichotic listening, shadowing
- Concept
- Selective attention
Key findings
Cherry found people recalled little content from the unattended ear but noticed physical changes such as a switch in speaker sex. Moray (1959) showed many listeners noticed their own name in the unattended channel. Broadbent’s filter model, Treisman’s attenuation model and late-selection theories try to explain this.
Frequently asked questions
- What is the cocktail party effect?
- Selectively attending to one voice in noise while still catching salient cues like your name.
- Who first studied it?
- Colin Cherry in 1953.
References
- Cherry, E. C. (1953). Some experiments on the recognition of speech, with one and with two ears. Journal of the Acoustical Society of America, 25(5), 975–979.
- Moray, N. (1959). Attention in dichotic listening: Affective cues and the influence of instructions. Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology, 11(1), 56–60.
- Broadbent, D. E. (1958). Perception and communication. Pergamon Press.