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    Selective attention

    选择性注意

    Concept

    What is selective attention?

    Selective attention is the ability to pick out some of the stimuli around us for processing while tuning out distractions.[1] Following one conversation at a noisy party is the classic case, which researchers call the “cocktail party problem.”[1][2]

    What changed in the ignored ear, and did listeners notice?

    The first six items are from Cherry (1953); the last is from Conway et al. (2001).

    Select a channel in the diagram or a card below for details.
    What listeners noticed in the ignored ear while repeating the message in the other, in Cherry’s (1953) dichotic-listening studies; the own-name item comes from later research. The channel diagram is schematic. Point at or tap parts of the figure for details
    What listeners noticed in the ignored ear while repeating the message in the other, in Cherry’s (1953) dichotic-listening studies; the own-name item comes from later research. The channel diagram is schematic. Save as image (PNG)

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    Key points

    • Cherry (1953) had people repeat a message heard in one ear. They recalled no words from the other ear and missed its switch to German, but noticed a male voice turn female.[2]
    • Broadbent (1958) likened attention to a filter that lets one channel through by physical features such as ear or pitch and blocks the rest before its meaning is analyzed.[1]
    • When Treisman swapped the stories between the ears, listeners followed the story to the wrong ear. She proposed that unattended input is weakened, not blocked, so important items still get through.[1]
    • Vision works the same way: 46% of viewers counting basketball passes missed a person in a gorilla suit or carrying an umbrella who walked through the scene, an effect called inattentional blindness.[3]

    An example

    At a noisy staff dinner, Lin follows every word her colleague says. When someone at the next table mentions her name, she turns at once. Asked what that table had been talking about, she cannot say.

    Misreadings and limits

    People often say you will always hear your own name in a crowd. In the classic studies only about 33% of listeners heard it in the ignored ear. Listeners with high working memory capacity, who block distraction better, heard it 20% of the time; those with low capacity, 65%.[4]

    Sources

    1. 1 Friedrich, F. (2026). Attention. In R. Biswas-Diener & E. Diener (Eds.), Noba textbook series: Psychology. DEF publishers. View source
    2. 2 Cherry, E. C. (1953). Some experiments on the recognition of speech, with one and with two ears. The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America, 25(5), 975–979. doi:10.1121/1.1907229
    3. 3 Simons, D. J., & Chabris, C. F. (1999). Gorillas in our midst: Sustained inattentional blindness for dynamic events. Perception, 28(9), 1059–1074. doi:10.1068/p281059
    4. 4 Conway, A. R. A., Cowan, N., & Bunting, M. F. (2001). The cocktail party phenomenon revisited: The importance of working memory capacity. Psychonomic Bulletin & Review, 8(2), 331–335. doi:10.3758/BF03196169

    Last checked against sources: October 27, 2026