Talk:Cocktail party effect

Other sources

I believe the sources the author used are not very confident. If one knows only a little about the cocktail party effect one can still see that research did not stop after Broadbent and that the cocktail party effect is probably one of the best understood paradigms in cognitive psychology.

I am afraid I do not have the time to correct it (and my English is not good enough to write an article), but there definitly are at least four parts that have to be integrated:

1. Neville Moray's experimental results. Moray found that Broadbents Filter Theory had to be revised as one could pay attention to another source if it was important enough. When the subject shadowed a message it could still hear parts of the other message such as his on name.
2. Anne Treisman's Attenuation Theory which seemed to be a better explanation than Broadbent's theory. It works like a siv rather than a filter.
3. Deutsch & Deutsch's Late Selection Theory. Broadbent's and Treisman's theories were early selection theories. The "bottleneck" (due to limited capacity) came early in lower cognitive mechanisms. Deutsch & Deutsch proposed that the "bottleneck" came later, in higher cognitive mechanisms, viz. the short-term memory.
4. Later it came to a controverse between Treisman an Deutsch & Deutsch: Is selection early or late? Johnston & Heinz (1978) proposed that both were right. An alternative model was proposed by Lavie (1995) which terms that the "perceptual load plays a causal role in determining the efficiency of selective attention."

Without any of these additions, this article does not reflect what it should.

Unisono01 (you can find me at wikipedia.de)

Parallels in vision

I've noticed, by experimentation after my interest's arousal one boring day, that much the same situation as the Cocktail Party Effect occurs with the eyes. I focus on an object in the center of my vision, as is normal, and hold a hand up at the very corner of my vision. I find it impossible to truly comprehend my hand beyond the fact of its presence without tearing my vision away from the center. I can tell when there is motion, and can count the fingers on my hand by noticing five movements when individually opening each finger, but my mind can't process counting five open fingers, even if my hand is only a third of my vision away from the center.

The effect you describe sounds very similar to the Cocktail Party effect. Indeed, you can concentrate your vision on your fingers in the periphery without fixating. So your attention does not necessarily have to be paired with your focus of vision. Normally, the reason why you can't see your hand acute, is not an attention phenomenon. It has rather to do with your eyes ability to see clear in the periphery of your eyes. In the centre of your focus, your eyes have a much better resolution, but you normally do not notice it. See, if you can find an article about the organisation of the mammal's eye.

Unisono01

It is my understanding via sources I do not recall easily that human vision is split into two areas: the primary focal area and the peripheral vision. The primary focal area is very sensitive to details and color, where as the peripheral is less so but much more sensitive to contrast and motion. As such we can easily detect specific subjects in our peripheral, but must look (almost) directly at them to clearly identify them.

Mark of chesterfamily dot org.

I corrected some of the grammar and tried to even out the writing, but in some instances, I don't know enough to make corrections.

1. You refer to Arons without telling us his full name or a full citation to his work outside the internet.

2. Maybe the citations should be in footnotes, rather than in the text, as the casual reader won't be particularly interested in original the sources.

3. Is it Broadbend or Broadbent? Both spellings appear.

4. You refer to "dichotic listening experiments," but the non-expert won't know what that means.

OK, I've fixed all of these problems, apart from number 4 which was already resolved by linking to the article on dichotic listening. --mcld 12:04, 2 June 2006 (UTC)

Effectively Broken External Link

The external link to "Theories of percption" requires a username and password. Will the person who posted it please provide some other method of access that works? otherwise, this should be removed. http://web.isp.cz/jcrane/IB/Theories_of_Perception.pdf -billy drexel

not for me/research?

I don't seem to experience this effect very much. On the contrary, I often have problems to hear what other people are saying when there is much background noise. This gives me many problems when attending parties, social events or simply goint to clubs/discotheques. Is there any research about people not having this filter or where it is not as effective? —Preceding unsigned comment added by 210.225.86.130 (talk) 01:27, 6 February 2008 (UTC)

Treisman 1960

What is Treisman (1960)?

It seems that perhaps this citation (not in the bibliography) was pasted from the Milton webpage, which is listed here as an external reference. That page also does not contain the citation in its bibliography (although it is peppered with references to Treisman (1960)). Looking at the bibliography of Goldstein's cognitive psychology textbook, two potentially relevant citations may be:

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

Treisman, A.M. (1964b) Contextual cues in selective listening. Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology, 12, 242–245.

(I don't have those papers handy or time to examine them or to check into what the the "real" Treisman 1960 may be.) —Preceding unsigned comment added by Sbump (talk • contribs) 23:28, 22 September 2008 (UTC)

Relation to fatigue and or depression?

Subjectively, the effect seems to go away when I'm either very tired or in one of my major-depressive bouts. Is there any research on this? If so, please add this info. -- 92.229.120.248 (talk) 01:18, 30 April 2010 (UTC)

You will have to look at Auditory Processing Disorder (APD) research. the "cocktail party effect" is one subtype of APD, regarding dichotic listening. APD is about having problems processing what you hear, or having a listening disability. dolfrog (talk) 01:57, 30 April 2010 (UTC)

Effect in music

If there's a source, we could mention that the same thing happens when listening to music. You can choose to pick out certain instruments in a song to the exclusion of others. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 173.164.218.92 (talk) 16:36, 10 December 2010 (UTC)

Improvement of this article

In the next month, I will be performing a series of edits on this article in hopes of improving its clarity, content, and quality of resources as part of the APS Wikipedia Initiative.RoconnorUWO (talk) 02:02, 13 March 2012 (UTC)

I have made a number of changes in this article, including a rewording of the article's introduction, as well as the inclusion of two subsections: "Models of attention" and "Visual correlates," each with a combined total of 15 new references added to the reflist. I also included two new images, one depicting Kahneman's capacity model and the other depicting a comparison of some selection models. I chose to leave the sections on Monaural and Binaural hearing alone, as detailed discussion of that was largely outside the range of my research. To view only the sections that I myself have included in this article, including references, please visit my user sandbox. RoconnorUWO (talk) 18:09, 10 April 2012 (UTC)