Failures of attention in selective listening.

Abstract

Subjects were required to answer questions, about a visual display, coming from the loudspeaker of a tape recorder. When 2 voices spoke at once, it was easier to listen constantly to 1 of the voices than to switch from voice to voice at intervals: provided the voices were familiar. Messages in which each word was separated from the next by a word from another message were harder to understand than messages which followed each other, whether both messages were to be answered or whether 1 was to be neglected. It was easier to understand a message if the irrelevant interpolated words were in a different voice than if they were in the same voice as the main message: but if the 2 voices changed names at frequent intervals there was no apparent difficulty in continuing to listen to a particular name. These results are interpreted as demonstrating that background speech may impair the understanding of a message even though it is not masked, and as emphasizing the importance of stimulus sequences rather than isolated stimuli.