Day 22 of 150 Language Difficulty 2/10
The cocktail party effect lets us track one voice in a crowd
Quick answer
The cocktail party effect lets us track one voice in a crowd. Today's question (Cocktail party effect) asks about a finding from Cherry, E. C. in 1953. The correct option is Selectively attend to one conversation in noisy multi-speaker environments — full explanation, primary source, and glossary cross-links below.
Today's question
The "cocktail party effect" describes the ability to:
Reveal the answer and explanation
Correct: B — Selectively attend to one conversation in noisy multi-speaker environments
Cherry (1953) used dichotic listening tasks — different speech streams piped into each ear — to show that listeners can track one channel while filtering the other. Critically, listeners still detect their own name in the unattended channel, indicating that filtering is not absolute and that some semantic processing reaches the unattended stream. The paradigm grounds modern selective-attention research and shows up wherever cocktail parties do.
About the source
Cherry, E. C. (1953). Some experiments on the recognition of speech, with one and with two ears. Journal of the Acoustical Society of America, 25(5), 975–979.
Every Cognition Bible question cites a primary source — a paper, book chapter, or monograph that exists, that we can point to on Google Scholar, and whose finding the question accurately summarizes. No fabricated authority strings, no name-drops without paper-level grounding.
More from the Cognition Bible
Done with today's question? Play the FOKIQ Daily — six puzzles across six cognitive domains, free, every day.