The cocktail party phenomenon revisited: the importance of working memory capacity

Wood and Cowan (1995) replicated and extended Moray's (1959) investigation of the cocktail party phenomenon, which refers to a situation in which one can attend to only part of a noisy environment, yet highly pertinent stimuli such as one's own name can suddenly capture attention. Both of...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:Psychonomic bulletin & review 2001-06, Vol.8 (2), p.331-335
Main Authors: Conway, A R, Cowan, N, Bunting, M F
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Adult
Attention
Female
Humans
Inhibition (Psychology)
Male
Mental Recall
Pattern Recognition, Visual
Perceptual Masking
Psychophysics
Speech Perception
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Summary:Wood and Cowan (1995) replicated and extended Moray's (1959) investigation of the cocktail party phenomenon, which refers to a situation in which one can attend to only part of a noisy environment, yet highly pertinent stimuli such as one's own name can suddenly capture attention. Both of these previous investigations have shown that approximately 33% of subjects report hearing their own name in an unattended, irrelevant message. Here we show that subjects who detect their name in the irrelevant message have relatively low working-memory capacities, suggesting that they have difficulty blocking out, or inhibiting, distracting information.
ISSN:1069-9384
1531-5320
DOI:10.3758/bf03196169