How attention works: why you can miss a gorilla in plain sight
The cocktail party effect: how you follow one voice in a noisy room
Twenty people talk at once, the music is up, and you still follow one friend's voice without missing a word. Your ears hear all of it. So what picks the one voice?
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1
Twenty voices, the music and a laugh by the door all reach your ears at the same time, mixed into one big noise.
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Yet you follow Miva with no effort. Your attention locks onto her voice by its sound: where it comes from, how high it is, how she speaks. This is the cocktail party effect.
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Now try to say what the two guests right behind you were talking about. You cannot. Their words reached your ears too, and almost none of them got in.
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In 1953, Colin Cherry played a different message into each ear of his listeners and asked them to repeat one of the two aloud. Of the other ear, they could say almost nothing: not the words, not the subject. They did notice when its voice changed from a man's to a woman's.
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5
Then, from the other side of the room, someone says your name, and you turn around at once. If the other voices never got in, how did your name?
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Quick check
At a party, a friend speaks to you from one side, and all the noise comes from the other side. Is she easier or harder to follow than a friend standing in the middle of the noise?
Show the answer
Easier. Attention picks a voice by its sound, and where it comes from is part of that sound, so a voice from its own side is easier to keep.
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Go further
The real names around Cherry's test.