cocktail-party effect

the ability to attend to one of several speech streams while ignoring others, as when one is at a cocktail party. Research in this area in the early 1950s suggested that the unattended messages are not processed, but later findings indicated that meaning is identified in at least some cases. For example, the mention of one’s name is processed even if it occurs in an unattended speech stream. See also attenuation theory.

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Psychology term of the day

May 10th 2024

inferential statistics

a broad class of statistical techniques that allow inferences about characteristics of a population to be drawn from a sample of data from that population while controlling (at least partially) the extent to which errors of inference may be made. These techniques include approaches for testing hypotheses, estimating the value of parameters, and selecting among a set of competing models. Also called inductive statistics. Compare descriptive statistics.