cocktail-party effect: a standalone construct

E. Colin Cherry named the problem in 1953, in Some experiments on the recognition of speech, with one and with two ears, when he asked how a listener at a noisy party can follow one talker while many others speak at once. Working with dichotic listening, in which a different message is played to each ear, Cherry showed that people can lock onto the wanted voice using cues such as its location, pitch, and speaking rate, and afterwards recall almost nothing of the message they had rejected. Neville Moray's 1959 study refined the picture: the ignored channel is mostly lost, yet a listener's own name spoken on it often breaks through, so some unattended speech is still processed for meaning. The construct is a landmark because it isolates selective auditory attention as a measurable ability, the filtering of one speech stream from competing streams, and it has anchored decades of work on attention, hearing in noise, and the design of hearing aids and speech-separation systems. The same phrase is used loosely in casual speech for simply overhearing one's name, a colloquial usage rather than a separate construct.[1][2]

Unit

A perceptual and attentional ability: how well a listener follows one target voice among competing talkers

Recovery means

Not applicable

Measured by

Assessed with dichotic listening and shadowing tasks and with speech reception thresholds that quantify intelligibility as competing talkers or noise are added