ABSTRACT
For his doctorate he worked on problems of selective attention, particularly the so-called “cocktailparty problem,” the ability of a listener to select one voice from a crowd of people talking simultaneously. At the end of the 1950s, stereophonic tape recorders were becoming available for the first time, and this technical development made possible great advances in the study of auditory attention. Donald Broadbent (then at the Applied Psychology Research Unit at Cambridge) was a major influence, as was Moray’s fellow
student Anne Treisman. He continued to work on auditory attention for some 20 years.
