The Cocktail Party Effect

Following classical conditioning the data show a decrease in variability and in the latency between stimulus presentation and the response. There is also a change in trend from increasing to no trend.

“involves a subject conducting a certain task, in this case recalling a series of numbers, while listening to different kinds of background music. If sound exhibits acoustical variations, or what Perham calls an "acute changing-state," performance is impaired. Steady-state sounds with little acoustical variation don't impair performance nearly as much.”(Cutler).

The cocktail-party effect was investigated in early studies of selective attention. It was first described by Cherry (1953). It’s the observation that even in a noisy environment people are able to focus their attention on who is talking to them. Cherry (1953) investigated this phenomenon by conducting a series of dichotic listening and

The type of information that lower thresholds according to Treisman’s attenuation theory words that have subjective importance and words that signal danger can still be recognized even at low volumes. Also the context of certain words could lower thresholds of someone’s attention in an unattended ear.

Ullsperger, Bylsma, and Botvinick (2005) investigated whether the findings of Mayr, Awh, and Laurey (2003) can be replicated and how much they can be shown across different task performances. Their specific study was motivated by a prior experiment where Gratton, Coles, and Donchin (1992) found that after an incompatible type trial reaction times were reduced and target processing occurred more frequently than flanker processing on the next trial. Botvinick, Braver, Barch, Carter, and Cohen (2001) believed that this follows the conflict monitoring hypothesis where incompatible trials involve a conflict with the response leading to greater top-down information processing (Botvinick, Nystrom, Fissell, Carter, & Cohen, 1999). However, Mayr et. al (2003) argued that the congruency sequence effect found by Gratton et al. (1992) was due to repetition priming because of stimulus repeats in a flanker task. This may have led to a faster reaction time with repeated trials. Mayr et al. (2003) used two experiments to present evidence for their argument. Both experiments failed to show the effect found by Gratton et al. (1992) when target and stimulus items did not repeat from trial to trial.

It was found that tasks involving colors cause more interference. These two studies were similar to the present experiment, as they both required participants to verbally name colors while inhibiting themselves from naming the typed color, as fast as possible.

The consumption of alcohol as a habitual behavior has long been associated with the American collegiate experience, despite the many known negative consequences a student who partakes in drinking can encounter. Because of the danger drunken students pose to a college’s reputation and the safety of its surrounding areas, much research has been done concerning the collegiate party and drinking scenes. This research mostly studied the demographics of the student body, so strategies developed to curtail the illegal or overconsumption of alcohol could be targeted towards the specific groups that demonstrated the highest likelihood of participating in these acts. When the strategies were implemented, however, there was little decline in the number of college students who chose to party and drink (Vander Ven 2011). This failure did not point toward a flaw in the research data, but instead a lack of research into the benefits a collegiate drinker receives that are rewarding to the point he or she cannot resist. This is the topic of Getting Wasted: Why College Students Drink Too Much and Party So Hard by Thomas Vander Ven.

- Based on the literature, we can record LFPs and get a similar MMN result for a deviant with an attention based P3Early component.

Dewan reported in 1967 [3] that he and several others could transmit letters of the alphabet using EEG recording; their ability to control voluntarily the amplitude of their alpha waves let them send letters using Morse code. Farwell and Donchin [4] used a second method for transmitting linguistic information by EEG; the P300 response to targets let them determine which of a sequence of displayed letters a person had in mind. Finally, Suppes and colleagues [5,6] reported that they were able to classify EEG responses to heard sentences and that there was information available through EEG concerning imagined speech. The work reported here verifies this latter result and develops it further, with the aim of using EEG brain waves to communicate imagined speech. Classification experiments show that brain-wave signatures of imagined speech lets one distinguish linguistic content, with varying degree of success. These signatures include differences in alpha-, beta- and theta-band activity. Our near-term goal is to use such signatures to design filters that let one distinguish linguistic elements in real time. One application is in further experiments which provide feedback to the thinker as to how recognizable a particular thought is, with the aim of training the thinker to produce brain waves which are more discernible. The focus within is on the results of a single experiment in which subjects produce in their imagination one of two syllables in

There is no universally accepted definition of EFs: Experts generated 33 terms, with few terms receiving general support (Eslinger, 1996). Important EFs include inhibition, planning, time perception, internal ordering, working memory, self-monitoring, verbal self-regulation, motor control, maintenance versus change of mental set,

When students come to college, they believe they need to “drink to get drunk” at frat parties. This mentality arises from cognitive processes, perceptions, and motor activations that explain why heavy drinking is so prevalent among college students at frat parties.

The article by Avital-Cohen and Tsal (2016) discussed the flanker task experiment, which asserted that distractor interference happens unconsciously as a result of focused attention toward the target. The results from the original flanker task indicated that participants had slower responses for incongruent trials, since the distractors are inconsistent with the target and would require a different response (Avital-Cohen & Tsal, 2016). However, Avital-Cohen and Tsal (2016) questioned the findings from the flanker task experiment. They decided to challenge the idea that only the target stimuli receives top-down processing, and not the distractors (Avital-Cohen & Tsal, 2016). The first experiment aimed to test whether the distractor interference is purely bottom-up processing as claimed in the flanker task. The experiment manipulated participants’ expectations of the target using the context effect - a type of top-down processing - by changing the distractors to be either letters or digits (Psych 240 lecture, 9/21/16). Then, the researchers conducted a second experiment and eliminated the ambiguity of distractors. They wanted to test whether the result from experiment 1 was caused by an overall bias or the ambiguous distractors. In experiment 2, the researchers predicted that they would obtain similar results to the first experiment only if the results were due to an overall bias effect (Avital-Cohen & Tsal, 2016). This study allows us to deepen our understanding of available

Late selection models provide a possible explanation for results obtained in some dichotic listening experiments where processing of unattended stimuli did seem to take place. For example, Corteen and Wood (1972, as cited in Naish, 2010), paired electric shocks with certain words, so that a conditioned galvanic skin response (GSR) took place. Later, when these words were again presented to the unattended ear , (without electric shocks), the GSR still occurred for these words as well as other words from the same category, indicating that processing for meaning had indeed taken place. Late section theories could also be used to explain the cocktail party effect (Naish , 2010) i.e. if someone is attending to one conversation at a party and their name is mentioned in another conversation in the room, they are able to hear their name and switch their

The “Mozart effect” is a statement based on research studies claiming that listening to the

These procedures involved in cognitive neuroscience require high levels of control, therefore are usually conducted in a laboratory setting, thus producing quantitative data that can be easily analysed, (Eysenck and Keane, 2010). Nevertheless, the techniques vary in the precision with which they identify the brain areas active when a task is performed (spatial resolution), and the time course of such activation (temporal resolution).Therefore, several procedures often need to be combined to compensate for limitations, (Sternberg and Wagner, 1999).