Cocktail party effect
The cocktail party effect refers to a phenomenon wherein the brain focuses a person's attention on a particular stimulus, usually auditory.
This focus excludes a range of other stimuli from conscious awareness, as when a partygoer follows a single conversation in a noisy room.
[3] It has been proposed that a person's sensory memory subconsciously parses all stimuli and identifies discrete portions of these sensations according to their salience.
It may also describe a similar phenomenon that occurs when one may immediately detect words of importance originating from unattended stimuli, for instance hearing one's name among a wide range of auditory input.
Auditory attention in regards to the cocktail party effect primarily occurs in the left hemisphere of the superior temporal gyrus, a non-primary region of auditory cortex; a fronto-parietal network involving the inferior frontal gyrus, superior parietal sulcus, and intraparietal sulcus also accounts for the acts of attention-shifting, speech processing, and attention control.
Binaural unmasking is a process that involves a combination of information from the two ears in order to extract signals from noise.
[7] Cherry developed the shadowing task in order to further study how people selectively attend to one message amid other voices and noises.
[17] Examples of messages that catch people's attention include personal names and taboo words.
[20] Taboo words often contain sexually explicit material that cause an alert system in people that leads to decreased performance in shadowing tasks.
[21] Taboo words do not affect children in selective attention until they develop a strong vocabulary with an understanding of language.
Older adults have longer latency periods in discriminating between conversation streams, typically attributed to the fact that general cognitive ability begins to decay with old age (as exemplified with memory, visual perception, higher order functioning, etc.).
Some notable examples of researchers doing such work include Edward Chang, Nima Mesgarani, and Charles Schroeder using electrocorticography; Jonathan Simon, Mounya Elhilali, Adrian KC Lee, Shihab Shamma, Barbara Shinn-Cunningham, Daniel Baldauf, and Jyrki Ahveninen using magnetoencephalography; Jyrki Ahveninen, Edmund Lalor, and Barbara Shinn-Cunningham using electroencephalography; and Jyrki Ahveninen and Lee M. Miller using functional magnetic resonance imaging.
[23] The earliest work in exploring mechanisms of early selective attention was performed by Donald Broadbent, who proposed a theory that came to be known as the filter model.
The filter model was hypothesized to work in the following way: as information enters the brain through sensory organs (in this case, the ears) it is stored in sensory memory, a buffer memory system that hosts an incoming stream of information long enough for us to pay attention to it.
However, Broadbent's model failed to account for the observation that words of semantic importance, for example the individual's own name, can be instantly attended to despite having been in an unattended channel.
Treisman also suggested a threshold mechanism whereby some words, on the basis of semantic importance, may grab one's attention from the unattended stream.
Diana Deutsch, best known for her work in music perception and auditory illusions, has also made important contributions to models of attention.
If the unattended information is recognized and deemed unimportant by the secondary filter, it is prevented from entering working memory.
The Yerkes-Dodson law predicts that arousal will be optimal at moderate levels - performance will be poor when one is over- or under-aroused.
Of particular relevance, Narayan et al. discovered a sharp decline in the ability to discriminate between auditory stimuli when background noises were too numerous and complex - this is evidence of the negative effect of overarousal on attention.
The allocation policy is affected by enduring dispositions (automatic influences on attention) and momentary intentions (a conscious decision to attend to something).
[32] That is to say, activities that are particularly taxing on attention resources will lower attention capacity and will influence the allocation policy - in this case, if an activity is too draining on capacity, the allocation policy will likely cease directing resources to it and instead focus on less taxing tasks.
Kahneman's model explains the cocktail party phenomenon in that momentary intentions might allow one to expressly focus on a particular auditory stimulus, but that enduring dispositions (which can include new events, and perhaps words of particular semantic importance) can capture our attention.
Specifically, how the physiology of auditory scene analysis affects how a species interprets and gains meaning from sound.
[43][41] These devices could benefit individuals with hearing loss, sensory processing disorders and misophonia as well as people who require focused listening for their job in health-care and military, or for factory or construction workers.
