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Auditory attention is a widely researched cognitive process to understand how selective attention occurs in the auditory system.
Selective auditory attention is the ability to focus on one audio stimulus that interests the person whilst ignoring others.
Cherry (1953) and Moray (1959) conducted significant research in this field, and developed
auditory attention tests.
Cherry (1953) investigated selective attention to different sounds. Cherry developed two
auditory attention test procedures:
Mixed speech – participants heard two mixed speeches at the same time. The participant had to shadow and repeat one of the messages.
Dichotic listening – a participant listened to a continuous message in one ear and repeated it aloud. Another audio clip was played in the other ear.
The shadowing ensures that participants perceive the intended message and ‘reject’ the other message.
In the mixed speech experiment, Cherry found that people had great difficulty distinguishing what they heard. In the shadowing experiment, they could recall more information from the attended message than from the ‘rejected’ message.
For example, in the shadowing methods, some did not recognise that the language in the ‘rejected’ message changed from English to German. However, physical changes in voice, such as the gender of the speaker, were usually noticed.
Cherry concluded people decide which auditory stimuli to pay attention to based on physical characteristics such as the gender of the voice or the location of the speaker. He proposed the ‘cocktail party effect’ to explain how selective attention can shift.
The cocktail party effect explains an example of auditory attention in the context of a party. When someone is in the middle of a conversation with their friends, they pay attention to that conversation. However, if they suddenly hear their name from the opposite side of the room, their attention will be focused on the person who called their name and not on the conversation.
Moray conducted three experiments to learn more about selective attention. The first experiment was designed to confirm Cherry’s (1953) results. The two later experiments were aimed at learning more about the factors that influence selective attention.
Research design
The study was conducted in a laboratory and used a repeated measures design.
The study used a dichotic listening task – in one ear, participants heard a message. In the other ear, a short list of simple words was heard repeatedly (this was the ‘rejected’ message).
Participants had to shadow the message they heard.
The volume of both audio stimuli was the same.
The list of words faded in and out and played a total of 35 times.
The participant then recalled the list of words (the ‘rejected’ message).
Thirty seconds later, participants performed a recognition test. The test consisted of the following tasks:
Seven words included in the shadowed message.
Seven words contained in the ‘rejected message’.
Seven words that did not appear in either message but sounded similar (control condition).
Results
| Variables (dependent and control) | Average of words recognised |
| Shadowed message | 4.9 |
| ‘Rejected’ list of words | 1.9 |
| Control variable | 2.6 |
Conclusions
The results support Cherry’s findings, as more words were recognised from the shadowed message. This finding suggests participants found it difficult to engage with the ‘rejected’ message.
Research design
This experiment recruited 12 participants. It was conducted in a laboratory setting using a repeated-measures experimental design.
There were ten trials. A fictional passage was presented in one ear on each trial, and a rejected message was presented in the other ear.
Participants had to shadow the fictional passage.
Both passages contained instructions.
Participants were told not to make mistakes.
The rejected messages played to participants sometimes included the participants’ names. Here is an example: ‘Listen to your right ear/All right, you may stop now. Listen to your right ear/John Smith, you may stop now.’
Moray was interested in whether participants were more likely to hear and remember the rejected passages if the passages contained their names.
Results
| Instructions with the participants’ names | Instructions without the participants names | |
| Number of times presented | 39 | 36 |
| Number of times heard | 20 | 4 |
Conclusions
The findings from this experiment may explain the cocktail party effect. The results suggest people shift their attention to a different auditory stimulus when they hear affective cues (a cue that elicits an emotional response) such as their name.
Research design
Results
A t-test revealed no significant difference between the means of the two groups.
Conclusion
The results of Experiment 3 show that nonaffective stimuli (numbers) do not cause people to shift their attention.
Moray’s study shows that when we focus our attention on a message, almost nothing from the ‘rejected’ message can get through to our attention. However, some important stimuli, such as a person’s name, can overcome this block.
Moray’s research aimed to confirm and build upon existing research in psychology, more specifically, selective attention. The purpose of the research is to improve our understanding of psychological processes. Therefore, this research is significant. However, when concluding research, it is important to consider strengths and weaknesses.
The strengths of the research are:
The use of shadowing techniques can increase the internal validity of the research.
This ensures that people focus their attention on the intended message rather than the message to be ‘rejected’.
Similar results between Moray and Cherry mean that the results are reliable.
The weaknesses of the research are:
Low ecological validity.
Moray did the study in a lab. As this is an artificial setting participants behaviour may be different than if it was done in a real-life setting. This reduces the validity of the experiment.
The sample is non-generalisable.
The first study did not describe the sample used. The following two experiments used a small sample. The problem with small samples is that they are not representative of the wider population. This leads to generalisability issues.
Auditory attention span is how long a person can focus on an audible stimulus.
Moray (1959) recruited students and people in the research team.
According to Broadbent’s filter theory of attention, stimuli is initially filtered, then selected and finally attended to.
The aim of Moray’s (1959) research was to confirm and elaborate on Cherry’s (1959) research.
We can increase auditory attention by focusing on the stimuli.
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