Chapter 1. Dichotic Listening

1.1 Introduction

This experiment is a replication of work done by E. Colin Cherry (1953) in the subfield of cognitive psychology known as attention. More specifically, Cherry’s work dealt with the topic of selective attention—the ability to choose one stimulus among many to attend to and comprehend. It is often referred to as the ”cocktail party effect” because of the way in which people can listen to one person who is talking to them in the midst of a room full of people having conversations. Cherry’s research showed that individuals do not remember the content of verbal information that is not attended to. However, he also demonstrated that specific elements of unattended verbal information can be heard and remembered; for example, which language is being spoken and whether someone says the participant’s name. These studies inspired models of processing later developed by Broadbent and Treisman.

Cherry, E. (1953). Some experiments on the recognition of speech, with one and with two ears. Journal of the Acoustical Society of America, 25, 975-979.

Broadbent, D. (1958). Perception and Communication. London: Pergamon.

Treisman, A. (1964). Selective attention in man. British Medical Bulletin, 20, 12-16.

1.2 Experiment Setup

Figure 1.1

1.3 Instructions

Please put on a set of headphones. Then, you will need to press the space bar to begin the experiment. You will hear two voices—one in each of your ears. Please repeat (or “shadow”) the words you hear in the left or right ear as instructed. This task will continue for 1 minute. When the task is concluded, you will be asked several questions about it.

1.4 Experiment

Figure 1.2

1.5 Results

Figure 1.3

1.6 Quiz