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 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.
Conway
A R
AR
Department of Psychology, University of Illinois, Chicago 60607-7137, USA. aconway@uic.edu
Cowan
N
N
Bunting
M F
MF
D000328:Adult; D001288:Attention; D005260:Female; D006801:Humans; D007266:Inhibition, Psychological; D008297:Male; D011939:Mental Recall; D010364:Pattern Recognition, Visual; D010470:Perceptual Masking; D011601:Psychophysics; D013067:Speech Perception