Moray

background

Attention is a limited resource. When our attention is focused on certain things a 'barrier' is put up that stops us from focusing on their thing.

Cherry was interested in how people put upon an intentional barrier at a party with multiple conversations going on.


This is where you only listen to the conversation you're participating in and not the conversations around you.


The cocktail party effect is when this barrier can be broken can be broken only by the sound of your name.

overall aim

To test Cherry's findings on the inattentional barrier more thoroughly

apparatus used

Brenall Mark IV stereophonic tape recorder

headphones

experiment 1

sample

undergraduate students

male and female

from Oxford University

procedure

Participants had to shadow a piece of prose that they could hear in one ear. This is the attended message because participants were focusing on it.

In the other ear (the message they weren't paying attention to) a list of simple words was repeated 35 times. This is the rejected message.

At the end of the task, participants completed a recognition task. Participants had to indicate what they recognised from a list of 21 words.

results

word list

conclusions

Participants are much more able to recognise words from the shadowed passage. Almost none of the words from the rejected messages broke the inattentional barrier

  1. 7 words from the shadowed passage
  1. 7 words from the rejected passage
  1. similar words that did not appear in either passage

mean number of recognised words

  1. 4.9
  1. 1.9
  1. 2.6

experiment 2

aim

to find out if an effective cue (their name) would break the inattentional barrier

sample

12 undergraduate students

male and female

oxford university

IV

whether an instruction within a rejected passage:

  • was preceded by the participant's name (i.e. it was affective)
  • was not preceded by the participant's name (i,e. it was non-affective

DV

whether participants were more likely to hear an instruction in a message they're not paying attention to if it is preceded by their name

this was operationalised by whether they reported hearing the instruction or whether they actually followed the instruction

procedure

two passages of light fiction were heard: one in one ear; the other in the other ear

6 passages that the participant heard contained an instruction at the start and then another instruction within them

both passages were read in a steady monotone at a pace of about 130 words per minute by a single male voice

results

number of times the instruction was presented in the rejected passage

affective instructions

non-affective instructions

39

36

number of times the instruction in the rejected passage was heard

affective instructions

non-affective instructions

20

4

conclusions

affective messages (such as names) are able to break the inattentional barrier. This backs up the previous work by Cherry.

led to a 3rd experiment because Moray was interested whether pre-warning would help break the inattentional barrier

experiment 3

aim

this experiment wanted to find out if pre-warning would help neutral material break the inattentional barrier

sample

28 undergraduate students

male and female

from oxford university

split into 2 groups of 14

design

independent

IV

warning: participants were told they should memorise as many digits they heard as possible

no warning: participants were told they'd be asked questions at the end about the shadowed passage

DV

how many digits they memorised from rejected message

procedure

participants were asked to shadow one message

the messages sometimes contained digits towards the end

the digits were sometimes only in the shadowed passage, sometimes only in the rejected passage, sometimes in both and sometimes there were no digits (control)

results

there was no significant difference between the groups in how many digits they were able to recall from the rejected passage

conclusion

warnings do not help neutral information break the inattentional barrier. The information must be meaningful in order to do this

overall conclusions

almost none of the verbal content from a rejected message penetrates a block when attending to another message

important messages like names can penetrate the barrier

a short list of simple words cannot be remembered even when repeated several times

it is difficult to make 'neutral' material (e.g. digits) important enough to break the inattentional barrier

evaluation

which ethical guidelines did Moray uphold?

students had the tasks clearly explained prior to participation

no real stress to the tasks themselves

which ethical guidelines did Moray break and how?

control group not told about digits in experiment 3 (deception)

ethnocentrism

ethnocentric as only conducted in one culture (U.k)

perhaps not ethnocentric as attention is universal

reliability

internal reliability.

external reliability

standardised procedures such as passages used, pace, and voice of speaker

sample sizes very small (unknown, 12 and 28 split into two groups of 14)

validity

internal validity

Controlled (e.g. passages used, pace, and voice of speaker, recognition task in experiment) but results may have been down to understanding of the passages, hearing ability etc and not attention

external validity

population validity

all students from a single area and occupation but both males and females

ecological validity

realistic to hear multiple conversations at once but not isolated, wearing headphones and tested afterwards