(See Broadbent section below for more details). Cherry conducted attention experiments in which participants listened to two different messages from a single loudspeaker at the same time and tried to separate them this was later termed a dichotic listening task. The effect was first defined and named “the cocktail party problem” by Colin Cherry in 1953. Hearing the intermixed voices of many pilots over a single loudspeaker made the controller’s task very difficult. At that time, controllers received messages from pilots over loudspeakers in the control tower. In the early 1950s much of the early attention research can be traced to problems faced by air traffic controllers. As soon as the auditory system has localized a sound source, it can extract the signals of this sound source out of a mixture of interfering sound sources. The auditory system is able to localize at least two sound sources and assign the correct characteristics to these sources simultaneously. The binaural aspect of the cocktail party effect is related to the localization of sound sources. People with only one functioning ear seem much more distracted by interfering noise than people with two typical ears. The cocktail party effect works best as a binaural effect, which requires hearing with both ears. It may also describe a similar phenomenon that occurs when one may immediately detect words of importance originating from unattended stimuli, for instance hearing one’s name in another conversation. This effect is what allows most people to “tune into” a single voice and “tune out” all others. The cocktail party effect is the phenomenon of being able to focus one’s auditory attention on a particular stimulus while filtering out a range of other stimuli, as when a partygoer can focus on a single conversation in a noisy room.
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