Cocktail party effect
From Biocrawler, the free encyclopedia.
The cocktail party effect is a term about “the ability to focus one's listening attention on a single talker among a mixture of conversations and background noises”, ignoring other conversations (Arons, 1992; “The cocktail”). This effect reveals one of the surprising abilities of our auditory system, which enables us to talk at a noisy place.
According to Clifford (2005), the cocktail party effect can occur when we pay attention to one of the sounds around us or are invoked by a stimulus which grabs our attention suddenly (p. 1). For example, when we are talking with our friend in a crowded party, we still can listen and understand what our friend says even if the place is very noisy but usually don’t remember what the person next to you was speaking. Then if someone over the other side of the party room calls out our name suddenly, we also notice that sound and respond to it immediately.
As someone referred to in “The Cocktail Party Effect”, the effect is an auditory version of the figure-ground phenomenon. Here, the figure is the sound one pays his/her attention and the ground is the any other sounds (“The Cocktail”).
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Studies related to this effect
This effect has been studied for many decades as the Cocktail party problem or Source separation problem (Arons, 1992; “Source”, 2004). According to Arons (1992),
- Much of the early work in this area can be traced to problems faced by air traffic controllers in the early 1950's. At that time, controllers received messages from pilots over loudspeakers in the control tower. Hearing the intermixed voices of many pilots over a single loudspeaker made the controller's task very difficult. (p.2).
As Arons (1992) also indicated in his report, the first work which referred to the term cocktail party problem was reported by a British researcher, Colin Cherry, at MIT in 1953. He conducted perception experiments in which subjects were asked to listen to two different messages from speaker at the same time and try to separate them. His work reveals that our ability of separating sounds from background is based on the characteristics of the sounds like gender of the speaker, direction from which the sound is coming, pitch, or the speaking speed (p. 2).
As Clifford (2005) reported, in 1950’s, Broadbent conducted dichotic listening experiments. In the experiments, subjects were asked to hear and separate two or more different messages from speaker at a time. From results of his experiment, he suggested that “our mind can be conceived as a radio receiving many channels at once”; each channel perceives a kind of sound. But we can pay attention to only one channel at a time because of our limited capacity. So there would be an audio filter in our brain which selects which channel we should pay attention to from many kinds of sounds perceived. This is called Broadbend’s filter theory (p. 1).
This area of study is still in progress now. In words of Arons (1992), because “most of the evidences have been obtained from perceptual experiments” and such evidence is often not very quantitative, the mechanism of this effect is not completely understood yet (p. 1).
References
- Arons, B. (1992, July). A Review of The Cocktail Party Effect. Retrieved March 20, 2005, from [1] (http://xenia.media.mit.edu/~barons/cocktail.html)
- Clifford, E. (2005, Apr, 21). Channels. In parkNote on Attention. Retrieved March 20, 2005, from [2] (http://www.sparknotes.com/psychology/cognitive/attention/section1.html)
- Source Separation. (2004, Oct, 20). Retrieved April 21, 2005, from [3] (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cocktail_party_problem)
- The Cocktail Party Effect. (n.d.). Retrieved March 20, 2005, from [4] (http://www.comp.leeds.ac.uk/ugadmit/cogsci/percept/pages/percfr.htm)
See also
External links
- Handbook for acoustic ecology (http://www.sfu.ca/sonic-studio/handbook/index.html)
- What is attention? Theory of selective attention (http://www.psych.utah.edu/2005_spring_3120_090/lessons/lesson7.html)
- Dichotic Listening Experiment (http://psychexps.olemiss.edu/InstrOnly_Page/dichotic.htm)
- Theories of perception (PDF) (http://web.isp.cz/jcrane/IB/Theories_of_Perception.pdf)
