Donald Broadbent‘s analysis of attention as an allocation of our limited capacity for processing received information was similar to analyses conducted in communications science in the following decades. The ‘cocktail party effect’, defined by information scientist Colin Cherry in the 1960s, recognizes that we focus on one conversation at a cocktail party, selectively tuning out several simultaneous conversations and the blaring music.
His findings mirrored those made by Broadbent’s dichotic listening experiments, whereby participants wearing headphones received different messages in each ear, leading him to conclude that we can hear only one message at any given moment in time. When faced with multiple channels of incoming information, our brains can only process one at a time. Therefore, we choose to focus our attention on the information stream that our brain deems most relevant and ignore the rest.
