People can become pretty good at the shadowing task, and they can easily report the content of the message that they attend to. Can he do that without being distracted by the information in the other ear? The typical dichotic listening task would have John repeat the story presented to one ear as he hears it. For example, let’s say that a story about a camping trip is presented to John’s left ear, and a story about Abe Lincoln is presented to his right ear. In order to control which message the person attends to, the individual is asked to repeat back or “shadow” one of the messages as he hears it. Dichotic listening simply refers to the situation when two messages are presented simultaneously to an individual, with one message in each ear. In particular, they used dichotic listening and shadowing tasks to evaluate the selection process. This cocktail party scenario is the quintessential example of selective attention, and it is essentially what some early researchers tried to replicate under controlled laboratory conditions as a starting point for understanding the role of attention in perception (e.g., Cherry, 1953 Moray, 1959). We have an amazing ability to select and track one voice, visual object, etc., even when a million things are competing for our attention, but at the same time, we seem to be limited in how much we can attend to at one time, which in turn suggests that attention is crucial in selecting what is important. This situation highlights an interesting set of observations. On the other hand, if someone behind you mentions your name, you typically notice it immediately and may start attending to that (much more interesting) conversation. You also are probably not aware of how tight your shoes feel or of the smell of a nearby flower arrangement. However, once you are engaged in conversation with someone, you quickly become aware that you cannot also listen to other conversations at the same time. There are so many conversations going on how is it possible to select just one and follow it? You don’t have to be looking at the person talking you may be listening with great interest to some gossip while pretending not to hear. Many people may be milling around, there is a dazzling variety of colors and sounds and smells, the buzz of many conversations is striking. A party provides an excellent example for our purposes. One way to get an intuitive sense of how attention works is to consider situations in which attention is used. Selective attention is the ability to select certain stimuli in the environment to process, while ignoring distracting information. Beyond just hearing your name from the clamor at a party, other words or concepts, particularly unusual or significant ones to you, can also snag your attention.

Dichotic listening task vs shadowing