ABSTRACT
Modern research on attention dates back to the early 1950s, when Colin Cherry and others conducted studies on selective listening. Cherry (1953) investigated the ability to attend to one speaker in the presence of other voices (the cocktail party problem). Subjects were asked to repeat a prose message while they heard it, rather than waiting until it finished. When the message to be repeated was presented to one ear while a message to be ignored was presented to the other ear, subjects were unable to recall the content of the unattended message. If the message to be ignored consisted of normal human speech, the subjects could identify the message as speech, but they were unable to identify any word or phrase heard in the rejected ear. Except for simple physical characteristics, the message to be ignored appeared to be “filtered out”.
