What you'll learn

• How Moray used dichotic listening and shadowing to study selective auditory attention.
• The “story” of the study: background, method, results, conclusions.
• How to evaluate Moray using validity, reliability, ethics, sampling and usefulness.
• How Moray compares with the paired contemporary attention study: Simons and Chabris (1999).

Big picture: attention in the Cognitive area

Moray (1959) is a classic core study in the Cognitive area of psychology. Cognitive psychologists study internal mental processes, such as attention, memory, perception and thinking. Because these processes cannot be seen directly, researchers infer them from behaviour — for example, what a participant reports hearing.

Moray was interested in auditory attention, meaning attention to sounds, especially speech. His study asks a very everyday question: when you focus on one conversation, how much of the “ignored” conversation still gets processed?

Background: the cocktail party problem

Imagine you are at a busy party. You are listening to your friend, but there are other conversations around you. Usually, you ignore most of them — until someone says your name. This is called the cocktail party effect.

Moray built on earlier research by Cherry (1953), who found that people could shadow one spoken message while ignoring another, but they remembered very little about the ignored message beyond basic physical features such as whether the voice changed.

Aim of Moray’s study

Moray wanted to investigate what happens to information in the rejected message, meaning the message the participant is told to ignore.

More specifically, he asked:

• Can people recognise neutral information from the rejected message?
• Can personally important information, such as the participant’s own name, break through?
• Do instructions help people notice information in the rejected message?

Method: how the study was done

Design

Moray carried out a series of laboratory experiments. A laboratory experiment is a controlled study where the researcher manipulates an independent variable, the factor being changed, and measures a dependent variable, the outcome.

Much of the procedure used a repeated measures logic, meaning the same participants experienced more than one condition. This helps reduce participant differences, such as some people simply having better hearing or memory than others.

Sample

Moray used small opportunity samples of adults, mainly students and research workers. Participants were expected to have normal hearing and to be able to follow spoken English.

This matters for evaluation because the sample was not large or representative of the wider population.

Materials and apparatus

Moray used:

• headphones for dichotic listening;
• recorded spoken messages;
• prose passages and word lists;
• digits in some conditions;
• the participant’s own name as an affective cue.

Procedure: the three linked experiments

Experiment 1: neutral material in the rejected message

Participants shadowed one message while a neutral message was played to the other ear. A short list of simple words was repeated many times — commonly described as 35 repetitions — in the rejected ear.

Afterwards, participants were tested to see whether they could recognise material from the rejected message.

Experiment 2: the participant’s own name

Participants again shadowed an attended message while ignoring the other ear. In the rejected message, Moray inserted affective material, especially the participant’s own name.

The key question was whether this personally meaningful cue would be noticed even though it was in the ignored channel.

Experiment 3: instructions and digits

Participants shadowed one message while digits were presented in the messages. Moray investigated whether giving instructions to listen out for digits would help participants report digits from the rejected message.

This tested whether people could simply “try harder” to monitor the unattended ear.

Results

Experiment 1 results

Participants showed little or no recognition of the neutral material from the rejected message. Even repeated exposure did not make the ignored words easy to recognise.

This supports the idea that unattended speech receives very limited processing.

Experiment 2 results

A key finding was that 4 out of 12 participants noticed their own name in the rejected message.

This is important because it shows the rejected message was not completely blocked. Some personally significant information could break through.

Experiment 3 results

Digits were reported much more accurately from the attended message than from the rejected message. Instructions to attend to digits did not greatly improve processing of the rejected channel.

This suggests attention has a limited capacity. You cannot fully process both auditory streams just because you have been told to.

Conclusions

Moray concluded that most unattended auditory information is not processed for meaning. However, the attentional filter is not absolute: highly meaningful information, especially your own name, may be detected.

This finding challenges a very strict version of Broadbent’s filter model, which suggested unattended information is filtered out early based mainly on physical features. Moray’s results fit better with the idea that unattended information may be weakened rather than completely blocked — an idea later developed in attenuation theories of attention.

Applying Moray to a new situation

Imagine you are revising in a café while your friend talks to you. A stranger at the next table repeats a random word several times, but later says your name.

Evaluation: AO3 points

Strength: high control and reliability

Moray’s study had strong control, meaning the researcher could standardise what participants heard and when they heard it. This improves reliability, which means the procedure could be repeated in a similar way to check whether the same pattern of results appears again.

The use of headphones and recorded messages made the study more scientific because the auditory input was carefully controlled.

Strength: useful evidence about selective attention

Moray’s study is useful because it helps explain real-life situations such as hearing your name in a crowd, missing announcements when focused on a task, or designing warning systems that need to capture attention.

It also contributed to theories of attention by showing that ignored information is not always completely blocked.

Weakness: low ecological validity

Ecological validity means how well a study reflects real-life behaviour. Moray’s task was artificial: wearing headphones and shadowing speech aloud is not the same as naturally listening at a party or in a classroom.

However, the basic issue — focusing on one sound while ignoring another — does resemble everyday listening.

Weakness: sample bias

The sample was small and mainly made up of students or research workers. Sample bias means the participants may not represent the wider population.

For example, students may be more used to verbal tasks or laboratory settings. The findings may not generalise fully to children, older adults, people with hearing difficulties, or people from different language backgrounds.

Weakness: validity of the shadowing task

Internal validity means whether the study really measures what it claims to measure. Shadowing does force participants to attend, but it may also create an extra memory and speech-production load. Participants might fail to report rejected information partly because they are busy repeating the attended message aloud.

So, poor recall of the rejected message may reflect both selective attention and the demands of the task.

Ethics

Using modern BPS Code of Ethics principles, Moray’s study is relatively low risk. There was no obvious physical or psychological harm.

However, full informed consent may be limited if participants were not told the exact purpose in advance, especially in the own-name condition. A good modern version would include consent, the right to withdraw, confidentiality, and a debrief explaining why the rejected message was important.

Comparison with Simons and Chabris (1999)

The paired contemporary study for the Attention theme is Simons and Chabris (1999), which investigated inattentional blindness. Inattentional blindness is failing to notice an unexpected visible event because attention is focused elsewhere. Participants watched a basketball video and counted passes; many failed to notice a person in a gorilla costume.

Similarities

Both studies show that attention is selective and limited. Moray showed this in hearing, while Simons and Chabris showed it in vision.

Both used controlled tasks and measured whether participants noticed unattended information. This makes them useful for the Cognitive area because both infer mental processes from observable responses.

Differences

Moray studied auditory attention using dichotic listening and shadowing. Simons and Chabris studied visual attention using a video-based task.

Moray found that personally meaningful information, such as your name, can sometimes break through. Simons and Chabris found that even a very unusual visual event can be missed if attention is focused on a demanding task.

Moray’s task is more artificial because shadowing into headphones is unusual. Simons and Chabris’ basketball video is also controlled, but it may feel more like real visual attention because watching moving scenes is more familiar.

Link to the key theme and area

Attention theme

Moray is important for the theme of Attention because it demonstrates selective attention experimentally. It shows that attention protects us from overload, but it also means we miss a lot of information.

Cognitive area

The study fits the Cognitive area because it investigates internal processing. Moray could not directly observe attention, so he inferred it from behaviours such as shadowing accuracy, recognition, and reports of noticing one’s own name.