From: malcolm@interval.com (Malcolm Slaney)
Date: Mon, 27 Nov 1995 16:50:02 -0800
Subject: Cocktail Party at CCRMA
Message-Id: <v02120d01ace009ee3774@[199.170.108.19]>

This week there is a cocktail party at the CCRMA Hearing Seminar... well
maybe just a description of one.... or maybe we should say it's a
discussion of what psychologists mean when the cocktail party effect is
described.  This is our third and final talk of the year on monaural sound
separation.

Diane Schiano, a researcher at Interval Research (and formerly Stanford and
NASA), will be describing what the cocktail party effect means to a
cognitive psychologist.  Clearly attention is an important part of this
process and we would like to know how much processing can the unattended
source receive?  Diane's talk will describe how cognitive psychologists
study attention and the cocktail party effect and the describe research
results.

        Who:    Diane Schiano (Interval)
        What:   Cognitive Psychology of the Auditory Cocktail Party
        When:   Thursday, November 30 at 11AM
        Where:  CCRMA Library (Top Floor of the Knoll at Stanford)

Parking regulations around CCRMA are being enforced more often these days.
You may either take your chances, park in the metered lot near Tressidor,
or get a one day C permit.  They are available from the Parking Office on
campus, or I'll bring some extras with me on Thursday if you want to buy
some.  The one-day permits are $0.50 a piece.

See you at CCRMA

-- Malcolm



People commonly report being able to concentrate fully on only "one thing at
a time", yet under some conditions they can apparently monitor--at least to
some degree--several information sources at once.  Affectionately known as
the "cocktail party phenomenon" when demonstrated in the auditory domain,
this simple observation was used as the basis for the development of
cognitive psychology's classic paradigm for studying attention.  Dichotic
listening studies involving "shadowing" aloud an attended message and an
unexpected memory test for ALL--both attended and unattended--messages were
used from the earliest days of cognitive research to address such questions
as: How selective is selective attention?  And: How much processing can an
"unattended" source receive?  An informal discussion of the logic of this
research and the role it played in informing early models of attention and
in influencing the direction of cognitive psychology research will be
presented.