A preregistered replication and extension of the cocktail party phenomenon: One's name captures attention, unexpected words do not.

Abstract

In the cocktail party phenomenon, participants cannot attend to more than 1 stream of information, but sometimes detect their own name being presented in the irrelevant message during a selective listening task. Here we present a preregistered replication of the phenomenon, in which we also tested whether semantically unexpected words have a similar effect and whether individual differences in working memory capacity as measured by the operation and running-span tasks are related to the ability to detect one's own name or unexpected words in the irrelevant message. Twenty-nine percent of the participants reported noticing their own name, and those who did made more errors on relevant, to-be-shadowed words presented around the time of the name. Low-span participants were more likely than high-span participants to notice their names and to commit shadowing errors concurrently to the presentation of the name or shortly after. In contrast, semantically unexpected words were rarely detected, nor were they associated with shadowing errors in the relevant message. Our results demonstrate once again that highly relevant stimuli such as one's own name are capable of attracting and capturing attention for a short period of time. Our results also demonstrate that unexpected words within sentences do not belong to this category of stimuli. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2021 APA, all rights reserved).