Cocktail party effect: a phenomenon of auditory perception

It has happened to all of us that, going out partying and being in a disco, we have approached someone to talk to them and, despite the noise, we have more or less understood what they were saying.

This, which seems surprising, has a name, and coincidentally is closely related to the field of leisure. The cocktail party effect is the ability to differentiate between the sound that interests us from those that can be a distraction..

This effect has its importance at an evolutionary level, and that is why it has been approached experimentally. If you want to know more about what it consists of and what theories have tried to explain it, we invite you to continue reading this article.

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What is the cocktail party effect?

The cocktail party effect is a phenomenon that consists of focusing auditory attention on a particular acoustic stimulus, while trying to filter and eliminate the rest of stimuli that can act as distractors.

The name of this phenomenon is quite representative of the effect, since, if we think about it, at a party, when we are talking to a guest, We try to filter what he is saying to us and ignore the music and other conversations that may be happening simultaneously, shaping the background.

Thanks to this phenomenon, we are able to differentiate between the voice of the person with whom we are maintaining the conversation of the rest of the people who may be shaping the acoustic background of the environment in which we are finding.

This same phenomenon is also what allows us, without being entirely focused on other conversations, to be able to grab attention when a word that is important to us is mentioned, as it can be that they call us by our name.

Neurological bases

Research has tried to find out what are the neurological bases behind the cocktail party effect. This phenomenon has a great evolutionary advantage, since it allows us to differentiate between the sound stimuli that interest us from those that can act as distractors. Because of this, It is implicit that there must be some mechanism at the brain level that gives an explanation.

Auditory attention occurs mainly in the superior temporal gyrus of the right hemisphere, where the auditory cortex primary. There is a whole neural network involved in the process of locating sounds from the environment. This network, which is frontoparietal, includes the inferior frontal gyrus, the superior parietal sulcus, and the intraparietal sulcus. These areas are involved in attentional change, speech processing, and attention control.

The cocktail party effect works when the person has full functionality of both ears. That is, for this phenomenon to occur properly, it is necessary for the person to have binaural hearing in good condition. Having two ears makes it possible to locate up to two sound sources in a satisfactory way, as well as attributing distance and acoustic properties to them.

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Theories of attention

Not all acoustic information that a person may be exposed to is processed by their brain. Multiple theories have been proposed to try to explain the fact that, in an environment in which present multiple sound stimuli, we are able to distinguish between what interests us and what constitutes the bottom.

Then we will see some of the most important proposals that have tried to explain to the phenomenon of cocktail party effect:

1. Broadbent

Donald Broadbent, conducting various experiments with dichotic listening, observed that the participants were more likely to remember those sound stimuli to which they had consciously paid attention compared to those to which they had not.

For example, if they were put on two headphones and asked to pay more attention to what was being heard by one of the both, the normal thing was that the participants said exactly the same thing that they had heard by one of the two speakers.

Based on this, Broadbent He stated that attention, and in this case auditory, had a kind of filter, that is, we consciously select what we want to hear from what we do not want to pay attention to.

The way this filter works would be the following: first, the information enters the brain through the ear and nerves associated, then it is stored in the sensory memory so that, later, we pay conscious attention and select what we want. interested.

Before the information is processed, the filter mechanism only allows the information that is important to pass to higher processes. Once this is done, goes to working memory, where it will be used for the conversation that is being held Or, in case something is being paid attention to, it will be stored in long-term memory.

However, later, Gray and Wedderburn ground Broadbent's model. They carried out an experiment with dichotic listening, only this one had certain peculiarities. Participants were made to hear the following phrase in one ear 'Dear, one, Jane' ('dear, one, Jane'), while in the other they heard 'three, Aunt, six' ('three, aunt, six '). Participants recalled hearing a mixture of both phrases, the most common being 'Dear Aunt Jane' rather than numbers.

2. Treisman

Anne Treisman raised the attenuation model. This model maintains that the information, once it has passed through some filters, is not completely blocked, unlike what emerges from the Broadbent model.

Instead of being completely ignored, uninteresting information is attenuated, that is, it loses steam, but is still there. This means that, due to carelessness or a distractor, you can later move on to higher attention processes.

To better understand this idea: if we are talking to someone at a party, it is normal that we do not pay attention to what the other conversations say. But, if someone mentions our name, even though we weren't paying attention at first, we are likely to turn around and let's see who said it. This is because our name, however muted it may be in the background noises, is something that has great meaning to us.

3. Kahneman

Finally, in Daniel Kahneman's model for hearing care, a difference can be noticed from previous models. Unlike Broadbent, Kahneman does not speak in terms of filters but of capacity. Attention is viewed as a resource that has to be distributed among several stimuli.

Attention is more efficient the better the person's arousal, that is, if the person has little energy and reduced concentration, their attention will also be less.

This means that the more tired you are, the less likely it is that the effect of a cocktail party will occur, making the person he has serious difficulties to distinguish efficiently between the conversation he is having from the rest of the stimuli acoustic.

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Cocktail party effect and hearing loss

The cocktail party effect only occurs if you have binaural hearing, that is, it is heard correctly by both ears. Those people who suffer from some type of deafness, whether total or partial, will find it significantly difficult to locate sound sources in space, in addition to distinguishing between what your conversationalist is saying with the sounds coming from the background.

For this reason it is common for people with affected ears to find it more difficult to discriminate against background noise; they are more distracted by interference that may exist in the environment, in addition to not responding satisfactorily to the conversation they are having.

It is for this reason that common situations such as going out to party in a noisy place or a family gathering, in which they can occur several conversations at the same time, are really frustrating situations for those who suffer from some type of disability auditory. They find it difficult to focus their auditory attention on the stimulus they really want to hear.

Bibliographic references:

• Broadbent, D.E. (1954). "The role of auditory localization in attention and memory span". Journal of Experimental Psychology. 47 (3): 191–196. doi: 10.1037 / h0054182.
• Gray J.A.; Wedderburn A.A.I. (1960). "Grouping strategies with simultaneous stimuli". Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology. 12 (3): 180–184. doi: 10.1080 / 17470216008416722. Archived from the original on 2015-01-08. Retrieved 2013-07-21.
• Kahneman, D. (1973). Attention and effort. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall.
• Bronkhorst, A.W. (2015) The cocktail-party problem revisited: early processing and selection of multi-talker speech. Atten Percept Psychophys. 77 (5): p. 1465-87.
• Toth, B., et al. (2019) Attention and speech-processing related functional brain networks activated in a multi-speaker environment. PLoS One. 14 (2): p. e0212754.
• Treisman, Anne M. (1969). "Strategies and models of selective attention". Psychological Review. 76 (3): 282–299. doi: 10.1037 / h0027242.