Shorter Articles and Notes: On the Recall of Stimuli Presented Alternately to two Sense-Organs

Abstract

Recently Moray established that digits presented alternately to the two ears could readily be recalled in the actual order of arrival, a result which appears to show that the switching time of attention between the ears is very rapid. In the present experiments it was found that, for this type of stimulation, recall was not significantly different whether the listener knew in advance or not if the digits were to be recalled ear-by-ear or in the actual order of arrival. It was also shown that Moray's result does not apply to digits presented alternately to eye and ear. These results are interpreted as showing that attention can select the general class of auditory stimuli rather than the particular class of stimuli on one ear: so that the apparent conclusion about switching time is not in fact correct.