Dichotic Listening
This experiment is a replication of work done by Cherry (1953) in the subfield of cognitive psychology known as attention. Cherry’s work dealt specifically with the topic of selective attention—the ability to choose one stimulus among many to attend to and comprehend. Selective attention is often measured using the “cocktail party effect.” We are very good at attending to one conversation in the context of several simultaneous conversations.
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 streams of audio—one in each of your ears. Please repeat (or “shadow”) the words you hear in the left or right ear as instructed. When the task is concluded, you will be asked several questions about it.
Begin Experiment
Results
Debriefing
Cherry (1953) conducted research on auditory attention using a dichotic listening task. His work has been used in the context of examining the “cocktail party effect” and has also inspired research on Change deafness, the finding that even highly salient changes are often missed if attention is directed elsewhere. Cherry’s research demonstrated that individuals do not remember the content of verbal information that is not attended to. These studies inspired models of processing later developed by Broadbent and Treisman. Cherry’s work continues to be relevant to both attention and auditory researchers, and his seminal 1953 paper has received thousands of citations and inspired countless research projects.
References:
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.
Quiz