Talk:Cocktail party effect

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[edit] 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)

[edit] 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)

[edit] 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

[edit] 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)