The cognitive area: Moray

Selective attention- Being able to focus our attention on one thing while blocking all other incoming sensory information .

Shadowing- To pay attention to information from one ear.

Dichotics listening- Listening to two different sets of information in each ear.

Provide a rigorous,empirical test of Cherry's finiding 

Undergraduate students and research workers of both sexes 

Experiment 1- no information about sample size

Experiment 2- 12 participants

Experiment 3- 2 groups of 14 participants  

• 3 lab experiments were conducted 
• Dichotic listening tasks were conducted that required participants to shadow one message while two messages were playing, one in each ear.
• Moray wanted to see what message, if any would penetrate the "block"and be paid attention to by the participants.

• 4 trail-shadowing tasks where completed by all participants on passages of prose for practice before the study.
• Passagers were recorded by 1 male speaker.
• Each message was approximately 60db above the participants. Speech rate was approximately 150 words per min.
• Used 'Brenell mark IV(4) stereophonic type recorder' .
• Loudness was mathched by asking participants to say when the messages appeared to be equivalent volume.

Dependent variable- Number of word recalled 

Procedure - A short list of simple words were spoken 35 times as the rejected or blocked message.

-Participants were then asked to recall all they could remember from the rejected message 

-Participants were given a recognition test of 21 word, about 30secs after the completion of the shadowing tasks 

-7 of these words were from the shadowed message, 7 of these were from the rejected message and 7 were in neither in the rejected or shadowed message but sounded similare / this was the controlled condition 

 Word list                                                Mean number of recognised words 

Words from the shadowed passage                    4.9

Word from the rejected passage                        1.9

Similar words that didn't appear                          2.6