84 • CHAPTER 4 Attention
DEMONSTRATION Focusing on One Message
Enlist the help of two people. Select two books on diff erent topics that you have not read before
and have both people read passages aloud simultaneously. Your task is to focus on just one
of the passages. As you do this, notice (1) how well you are able to take in information in the
“attended” passage and (2) whether you are taking in anything from the “unattended” passage.
Try this with two male readers and with one male and one female reader, and note whether this
infl uences your ability to focus on just one of the messages.Your task in this demonstration—focusing on one message—is similar to the task
in classic experiments done by Colin Cherry (1953), who used a procedure called dich-
otic listening.METHOD Dichotic Listening
In a dichotic listening experiment, diff erent messages are presented to the
two ears. In a selective attention experiment, participants are instructed to
pay attention to the message presented to one ear (the attended message),
repeating it out loud as they are hearing it, and to ignore the message pre-
sented to the other ear (the unattended message). Participants are usu-
ally able to accomplish this task easily, repeating the message with a delay
of a few seconds between hearing a word and saying it. This procedure
of repeating a message out loud is called shadowing (● Figure 4.2). The
shadowing procedure is used to ensure that participants are focusing their
attention on the attended message.As Cherry’s participants shadowed the attended message,
the other message was stimulating auditory receptors within the
unattended ear. However, when asked what they had heard in the
unattended ear, participants could say only that they could tell
there was a message and could identify it as a male or female voice. They could
not report the content of the message. Other dichotic listening experiments have
confirmed this lack of awareness of most of the information being presented to the
unattended ear. For example, Neville Moray (1959) showed that participants were
unaware of a word that had been repeated 35 times in the unattended ear.
Cherry showed that a listener can attend to just one message, and Donald
Broadbent (1958) created a model of attention to explain how this selective attention
is achieved. This early selection model, which introduced the fl ow diagram to cogni-
tive psychology (see page 13), proposed that information passes through the following
stages (● Figure 4.3):● FIGURE 4.2 In the shadowing procedure, a person
repeats out loud the words that have just been heard.The yellow
dog chased...The yellow
dog chased...The meaning
of life is...● FIGURE 4.3 Flow diagram of Broadbent’s f ilter model of attention.Sensory
Messages memory Filter Detector To memoryAttended
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