Abstract
A person can attend to a message in one ear while seemingly ignoring a simultaneously presented verbal message in the other ear. There is considerable controversy over the extent to which the unattended message is actually processed. This issue was investigated by presenting dichotic messages to which the listeners responded by buttonpressing (not shadowing) to color words occurring in the primary ear message while attempting to detect a target word in either the primary ear or secondary ear message. Less than 40% of the target words were detected in the secondary ear message, whereas for the primary ear message (and also for either ear in a control experiment), target detection was approximately 80%. Furthermore, there was a significant negative correlation between buttonpressing performance and secondary ear target-detection performance. The results were interpreted as being inconsistent with automatic processing theories of attention.
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Reference Note
1. Bowers, K. S., & Brenneman, H. A.Unattended information and hypnotic susceptibility. Paper presented at the convention of the Society for Clinical and Experimental Hypnosis, Montreal, 1974.
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This research was based on a City University of New York doctoral dissertation at Brooklyn College by Jack Bookbinder and was supported by research grants to Eli Osman from the United States Department of Health, Education, and Welfare, Public Health Service (NIH Grant RO1 NS10843) and the PSC-BHE Research Award Program of the City University of New York.
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Bookbinder, J., Osman, E. Attentional strategies in dichotic listening. Memory & Cognition 7, 511–520 (1979). https://doi.org/10.3758/BF03198268
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.3758/BF03198268