The cocktail party effect — our stunning ability to filter out words and sounds

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The cocktail party effect — our stunning ability to filter out words and sounds​

The “Cocktail Party Effect,” is a remarkable showcase of our auditory system’s capabilities. In the whirl of a bustling party, filled with clinking glasses, laughter, and overlapping conversations, you can sometimes tune into one specific conversation, effortlessly filtering out everyone else’s words.

Essentially, the cocktail party effect is a phenomenon that describes the ability of the human auditory system to focus on a single auditory source, like a conversation, in a noisy environment, such as a crowded room or a “cocktail party.” But why does this phenomenon happen?

According to research pioneered decades ago by Colin Cherry (and continued in several other studies), this cocktail party effect has more to do with our brains than our ears.

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The cocktail party effect -- our stunning ability to filter out words and sounds

It's a noisy world yet we somehow cope in the cocktail party of life.

www.zmescience.com

 

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Related - selective attention

A dumbfounding study ... that many now find hard to believe revealed that if people are asked to focus on a video of other people passing basketballs, about half of watchers missed a person in a gorilla suit walking in and out of the scene thumping its chest.

Now research delving further into this effect shows that people who know that such a surprising event is likely to occur are no better at noticing other unforeseen events — and may even be worse at noticing them — than others who aren't expecting the unexpected.

The so-called "invisible gorilla" test had volunteers watching a video where two groups of people — some dressed in white, some in black — are passing basketballs around. The volunteers were asked to count the passes among players dressed in white while ignoring the passes of those in black. ...

These confounding findings from cognitive psychologists Daniel Simons and Christopher Chabris detailed in a 1999 study revealed how people can focus so hard on something that they become blind to the unexpected, even when staring right at it. When one develops "inattentional blindness," as this effect is called, it becomes easy to miss details when one is not looking out for them.
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Of course, these results are utterly counterintuitive, with 90 percent of people now predicting that they would notice the gorilla in the video. The problem is that this video has become so famous that many people know to look for a gorilla when asked to count basketball passes.

In new research, Simons decided to use the infamy of the invisible gorilla to his advantage, creating a similar video that asked for the same results from the audience.

"I thought it would be fun to see if I could monkey with people's intuitions again using almost the same task," Simons said.
...

More (read after watching the videos):

'Invisible Gorilla' Test Shows How Little We Notice

Invisible gorilla basketball video highlights inattentiveness.

www.livescience.com

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