Journal oj Experimental Ptyeholaty

1969, Vol. 79, No. 1, 27-34

IS SELECTIVE ATTENTION SELECTIVE PERCEPTION

OR SELECTIVE RESPONSE?
A FURTHER TEST*
ANNE M. TREISMAN AND JENEFER G. A. RILEY
Oxford University Institute of Experimental Psychology, Oxford, England

The 5s were asked to repeat back one of two lists of synchronized digits
presented dichotically. They also were asked to listen for occasional letters
in either ear and to stop shadowing at once and tap with a ruler if they
detected one of these letters. They detected significantly more letters in the
ear whose digits they were shadowing than in the other ear (an estimated
76% compared to 33%) when the target letters were in the same voice as the
digits and thus required identification at the verbal level. When the letters
were in a different voice from the rest of the message, and could be distin-
guished by a simpler physical characteristic, SB detected almost all of them
on both ears. The results are interpreted as supporting the hypothesis that
the chief effect of attention in tasks with competing speech messages is to
limit perception of the verbal content of secondary messages, rather than to
restrict responses or memory.

When Ss are asked to attend to and repeat
back one of two speech messages presented
dichotically, they normally can report little
or nothing about the verbal content of the
unattended message. Broadbent (1958) sug-
gests that a selective "filter" rejects messages
that would overload the perceptual system
before they are fully analyzed, separating
them on the basis of physical characteristics
such as spatial location or voice quality,
which have been identified at an earlier
stage. Deutsch and Deutsch (1963), on the
other hand, argue that all incoming stimuli
receive full perceptual analysis and that the
selection shown in attentive behavior is made
only to determine responses and memory.
At this stage the most "important" stimulus
at any given moment will inhibit responses
to other stimuli and will control behavior
and awareness.
Among the evidence leading them to this
view was the fact that important and rele-
vant stimuli are sometimes (though not al-
ways) detected even when they occur in an
otherwise unattended message (Moray,
1
The stimulus material was prepared in collabo-
ration with Saul Sternberg at Bell Telephone
Laboratories, Murray Hill, New Jersey. The
authors are grateful to Bell for the use of their
computing facilities and to S. Pruzansky who
wrote the program for generating the stimulus
lists. The research was partly supported by a
grant from the Medical Research Council.
27
1959; Treisman, 1960). However, these
detections are relatively rare, ranging from
only 6% of contextually probable words
(Treisman, 1960) to a maximum of 50% of
SV own names (Moray, 1959). Moreover,
there is little other evidence for perception
of the verbal content of unattended mes-
sages, when these are emotionally neutral or
irrelevant, since even a change of language
is not detected (Cherry, 1953). Treisman
(1960, 1964) therefore suggested instead
that the selective filter might reduce the
signal-to-noise ratio of unattended messages
rather than blocking them completely. Very
important or relevant words might still occa-
sionally be detected, provided that -SV cri-
teria for perceiving them were sufficiently
low to compensate for the reduced sensory
evidence. Assuming that speech recognition
involves more than a single stage of analysis,
this selective system would be economical
for perception since unattended words would
be discarded from further analysis after fail-
ing tests at the earliest stages.
Treisman and Geffen (1967) tried to test
these two theories of where the limit arises
in selective listening tasks. Their 6"s were
asked to repeat back (shadow) one of two
dichotic messages and at the same time to
monitor both messages and to tap when-
ever they heard a particular target word in
either ear. Treisman and Geffen argued
28 ANNE M. TREISMAN AND JENEFER G. A. RILEY
that since the tapping response and its stim-
ulus were identical for both messages, any
difference in the efficiency of monitoring the
two messages must be due to a failure to
perceive the nonshadowed message. If .SV
response and memory capacity were sufficient
to allow them to tap to targets in the at-
tended message while repeating it back, they
should be equally adequate for tapping to
targets in the other message when these
occurred, provided that perceptual analysis
of both messages was complete, as suggested
by Deutsch and Deutsch (1963). In fact
there was a large difference in the percentage
of targets detected in the attended message
(87%) and in the unattended message
(8%), which they felt supported the hypoth-
esis of a limit to perception.
Despite this evidence, it might be argued
that since S was instructed, as his primary
task, to continue shadowing the passage to
the end, he was required to make two re-
sponses at once. If 5"s motivation was not
identical for the shadowed and nonshadowed
messages, a difference in the number of tar-
gets responded to could be due to a difference
in motivation affecting which targets were
stored and responded to. This objection
was raised by Deutsch and Deutsch (1967).
They proposed that Treisman and Geffen's
results could be reconciled with their theory
since the requirement to repeat as well as
tap to attended targets would have increased
their importance compared with the unat-
tended targets and so have produced more
efficient responding. According to Deutsch
and Deutsch's theory, "stimuli with a greater
weighting of importance inhibit certain out-
puts [such as storage, motor response] of
the structures processing stimuli with a lesser
weighting of importance [1967, p. 362]."
In support of this interpretation, they quote
an experiment by Lawson (1966) who used
tones instead of words as targets. Lawson's
5"s detected as many tones in the unattended
as in the attended message. Deutsch and
Deutsch (1967) suggest that this was be-
cause they were not asked to shadow the
targets in either ear. But another explana-
tion (Treisman, 1964) is that tones may be
distinguished from speech at an early stage
of perceptual analysis, before the relevant
message is selected. Broadbent's (1958)
filter theory assumes that certain general
physical characteristics of messages may be
identified in parallel for all incoming stimuli
and used to distinguish the different input
channels between which his "filter" then
selects. Information about these physical
characteristics for both messages is available
to 5 (Cherry, 1953).
Deutsch and Deutsch (1967) proposed as
a critical test of the two theories that Treis-
man and Geffen's experiment be repeated
without the requirement to shadow the at-
tended targets; this, the present authors'
agree, is a necessary control. They also
required that the targets should be in a
different voice from the rest of the message
which (a) does not seem to be required by
their theory and (>) would invalidate the
experiment as a critical test since Broad-
bent's filter model assumes that the differ-
ences distinguishing voices, like the tones
used by Lawson, are discriminated prior to
the selection between attended and unat-
tended messages. Thus, even if control
words in a different voice also were included,
as Deutsch and Deutsch (1967) suggest, 5"s
should still, on the filter model, be able to
use the voice characteristic to reduce con-
siderably the number of "unattended" words
to be monitored.
A more useful improvement on the earlier
experiment would be to require 5" to shadow
only until he detected a target in either
message. He should then immediately stop
shadowing and instead tap to the target
word. This procedure would avoid difficul-
ties due to the possibility of unequal memory
storage or response competition, and the re-
sults should therefore be a more conclusive
test of the two hypotheses.
In a reply to Deutsch and Deutsch's
(1967) comments, Treisman (1967) briefly
reported an experiment to test these points.
This experiment has been extended and is
reported more fully here. The main fea-
tures of the experiment relevant to the con-
troversy with Deutsch and Deutsch were:
(a) the removal of any bias due to unequal
"importance" by explicitly telling 5"s not to
repeat the target words, (&) the removal of
any possible load on memory or any re-
 SELECTIVITY OF RESPONSE AND PERCEPTION
sponse competition by asking .9s to repeat
back items only up to the target (after which
they were to stop shadowing at once and
tap), and (c) a comparison between per-
formance when targets were in the same
voice as the rest of the message and when
they were in a different voice. Since the
difference in voice should not affect the
response difficulty or the relative impor-
tance of primary and secondary targets, it
should not, on Deutsch and Deutsch's (1963)
theory, produce any difference in perform-
ance. Any such difference would have to
arise during perception, where, according to
Broadbent's model, a difference in voice
could be detected equally well in either
message.
The experiment was similar to one by
Peterson and Kroener (1964), in which 5s
shadowed a list of digits in one ear and
recalled a target letter presented at varying
list positions in the other ear. Peterson and
Kroener suggested that the efficiency of
recall when the letter occurs in the last posi-
tion (i.e., with zero delay) gives a measure
of SV ability to perceive a letter while at-
tending to a competing digit. They found
that about 50% of these end-of-list letters
were reported correctly after extended prac-
tice. However, this condition may not give
a true picture of perception during attention
to competing items. When recall was tested
with zero delay, the list ended immediately
after the target letter. If one accepts Broad-
bent's suggestion that items not immediately
attended to can be held for 1 or 2 sec. in a
prepercepual "sensory" store, performance in
Peterson and Kroener's zero delay condition
could have measured retrieval from this
sensory store with subsequent full attention.
In order to measure perception during con-
tinuous inattention we need a task in which 5"
responds with zero delay (to avoid any load
on memory), but in which the stopping point
is determined by 5"s detection of the target
rather than by the actual ending of the pre-
sentation. The 6" would not be free then
to shift his attention immediately after the
target letter unless he had already detected its
presence.
The present experiment also may throw
light on a further question. This is the role
29
played by the continuity of speech and by
the asynchrony of words in the two ears
in maintaining attention to a particular mes-
sage. Shadowing experiments have gener-
ally used coherent prose in which contextual
dependencies are strong at the semantic,
syntactic, and phonetic levels and with the
items seldom exactly synchronized on the
two ears. Experiments by Sternberg2 using
exactly synchronized dichotic stimuli have
led him to suggest that selective attention to
one ear might be much more difficult with
items that were synchronized and lacked
phonetic and semantic continuity within
either ear. This suggestion is supported by
the difference in results of two otherwise
very similar experiments (Bartz, Satz, Fen-
nell, & Lally, 1967; Yntema & Trask, 1963).
While Yntema and Trask used computer-
synchronized words and found recall of items
grouped by ear of arrival was difficult, Bartz
et al. used normally spoken words, syn-
chronized by ear, and found much more
efficient recall of items grouped by ear. In
the present experiment, digits were used
which were equated in length, separated from
each other by silence, and exactly synchron-
ized on the two ears. These stimuli have
the advantage that no targets occur on one
ear during a silence on the other ear, which
might allow a shift of attention undetected
by E since it produces no shadowing failures.
METHOD
Stimulus material.The messages used in this
experiment consisted of lists of 32 digits occurring
in 16 simultaneous pairs, one member of each pair
in each of S's ears. The target items for the
monitoring task were letters, one in each list of
digits, either in the same voice as the digits or
in a different voice. Half the target letters were
in the ear receiving the digits to be shadowed and
half in the other ear. The digits and letters used
in preparing these tapes were recorded before-
hand and processed at Bell Telephone Laboratories
as follows: A male and a female speaker each
recorded on digital tape a complete set of five
examples of each digit and each letter. The sam-
pling rate was 10 kHz. with a corresponding 4
kHz. cutoff, subsequently reduced by further
processing to 3,050 Hz. The most intelligible
version of each item was selected and its beginning
and end were determined from an oscillograph of
2
S. Sternberg and S. Pruzansky, 1963, article in
preparation.
30 ANNE M. TREISMAN AND JENEFER G. A. RILEY
the digital tape. Each item was then either com-
pressed or expanded to 250-msec. duration, using
a computer program prepared at Bell Telephone
Laboratory (using a version of the phase vocoder
developed by Flanagan and Golden, 1966, and modi-
fied by S. Hanauer 8 ). The apparent loudness of
all items was equated. A stimulus-ordering pro-
gram (written by S. Pruzansky, see Footnote 1)
was used to generate lists of synchronized pairs of
stimuli as follows: 16 lists of 16 pairs of simul-
taneous digits were recorded in the man's voice,
one digit of each pair on each track of the tape.
One digit in each list was replaced by a letter,
two letters in each track in each of the following
list positions: 4, 7, 10, and 13. Half the letters in
each of these conditions were in the same man's
voice as the digits and half in the woman's voice.
The order of these different lists on the tape was
randomized. The rate of presentation within the
lists was approximately 1.8 dichotic pairs per
second; each 250-msec. pair was followed by a
300-msec. silence. These digital tapes were con-
verted to analogue form for playback over head-
phones from a two-channel tape recorder (Ferro-
graph).
Subjects,Twenty-four of the 26 5s were re-
search students or undergraduates at Oxford
University, 1 was a teacher and 1 a secretary.
They volunteered for the experiment and had no
previous experience of selective listening tasks.
All were right handed.
Procedure.The 16 experimental 5s were given a
number of practice trials at shadowing lists of this
sort. Practice was continued until they were
getting about 75% items correct from the selected
list. They then were given a few trials of practice
at the experimental task, defined as follows: They
were asked to shadow the digits on the selected ear
as accurately as possible. Half of the 5s shadowed
the right ear and half the left ear. This was their
main task and they were told they would get
no credit for trials on which they made errors or
omissions. They also were asked, if they ever
detected a letter in either ear, to stop shadowing
at once before repeating the letter and to tap with
8
S. Hanauer, computer program written at Bell
Telephone Laboratories, 1967.
TABLE 1
PERCENTAGE OF TARGET LETTERS DETECTED IN EACH CONDITION
Same Voice
Shadowed
(AS)
M SD
Unconnected 70.0 14.4
Corrected for shifts in
attention 76.4 1S.7
a ruler. Given that they had shadowed all digits
up to the letter correctly, they were told that it
was equally important to tap to targets in either
ear. Each 5 was presented with the 16 experi-
mental lists twice through, with a short break be-
tween the two runs. Half of the 5s were told
on the first run what the letter would be and half
were told on the second run. On the other run,
they did not know which letter would occur. The
5s were not told that the second run used the
same lists as the first. They were always told,
before each list, whether the target letter would
be in the same man's voice as the digit or in the
woman's voice, but they were never told in which
ear it would be presented or in which position in
the list. Three 5s who got less than 60% of digits
correct in shadowing the experimental lists were
replaced since it was difficult to know where their
attention was centered during this high propor-
tion of omissions.
A further eight 5s were run as controls to see
what effect the monitoring task had on shadowing
efficiency. These 5s were again given some prac-
tice trials at shadowing and then the 16 experi-
mental lists once through, with the task of shadow-
ing as accurately as possible the digits on the se-
lected ear (right ear for four 5s, and left for four).
RESULTS
A number of different variables were an-
alyzed in the results: (a) the percentage of
target letters detected in each of the four
main conditionssame voice on shadowed
ear (AS), same voice on nonshadowed ear
(NS), different voice on shadowed ear
(AD), and different voice on nonshadowed
ear (ND) (these are given in Table 1 to-
gether with their standard deviations, the
latter being estimates of the population dis-
tribution, not of the mean); (&) the per-
centage of digits correctly shadowed up to
the detected target letter, or up to the end
of the list when the target letter was missed;
(c) the percentage of omissions or errors in
Different Voice
Nonshadowed Shadowed Nonshadowed
(NS) (AD) (ND)
M SD M SD M SD
39.0 13.8 99.0 3.0 99.0 3.0
33.4 17.9
 SELECTIVITY OF RESPONSE AND PERCEPTION
TABLE 2
SHADOWING SCORES FOR EXPERIMENTAL AND CONTROL GROUPS
Percentage Correct Digits
M SD
Experimental 71.5 8.2
Control 80.5 5.5
Significance of difference P < .02
shadowing these digits; and (d) the percent-
age of digit intrusions from the wrong ear in
the shadowing responses. These shadowing
scores are all given in Table 2 together with
results from the control 5s who did the shad-
owing with no additional monitoring task.
The reason they sum to more than 100%
is that 5s sometimes repeated both members
of a dichotic pair; the intrusions are given
as a percentage of 5's responses plus omis-
sions, while the items correct, omissions, and
errors are taken as a percentage of the
stimulus items presented.
If one takes the percentage of intrusions
from the wrong ear as a lower estimate of the
proportion of time 5" spent attending primar-
ily to the wrong ear, one can correct the
scores for targets detected during attention
and during inattention as follows : If PA is the
probability of detecting a target while attend-
ing to that ear, and PN is the probability of
detecting a target when not attending to the
ear receiving it, the actual scores obtained,
A and N, contain a mixture of these two
conditions. If PI is the proportion of in-
trusions, the true probabilities can be esti-
mated from the equations as follows :
Solving for PA and PN in these equations,
separately for each S, gives the corrected
estimates given in Table 1. They are lower
estimates since 5" also may have switched his
attention while making omissions and errors.
This correction was not applied to targets in
the different voice since the theory assumes
(and the results support the assumption)
that the direction of attention is irrelevant
to the probability of detecting a change of
voice. This is assumed to occur at some
31
Percentage Intrusions Percentage Errors and
Omissions
M SD M SD
14.0 4.7 16.6 6.6
10.6 4.6 10.8 3.2
Not Sig nificant P< .05
stage preceding the operation of the selec-
tive filter.
The difference between the proportion of
targets in the same voice detected during
attention and inattention (AS vs. NS) is
highly significant, t (15) =6.32, p < .001.
With targets in the different voice (AD vs.
ND), there is no difference at all; almost
all the targets were detected in both ears.
The difference between the detection rates
for attended targets in the same voice and
in the different voice (AS vs. AD) also was
significant, t (14) = 5.51, p < .001. The
proportion of targets detected in the same
voice is about the same as the proportion of
words shadowed correctly, roughly 70%.
However, there was no correlation over in-
dividual 5s between shadowing scores and
monitoring scores on either attended or
unattended ears. When 5s missed tapping
to attended targets in the same voice they
either said the competing digit from the
other ear (on 35% of occasions), distorted
the letter into a digit (14% of occasions),
or left it out altogether (51% of occasions).
When the targets were in the same voice
on the unattended ear (NS), 5s were slightly
more likely to detect them when they had
been told which letter would occur than when
they were monitoring for "any letter," but
the difference failed to reach significance
(43.5% compared to 34.3%). With targets
in the different voice, knowledge of the target
letter made no difference, as one would ex-
pect, if 5s were not using phonemic cues to
detect these targets. In trials when the
letters were not known in advance, 5s who
had tapped correctly were asked if they could
report what the letter had been. They made
a considerable number of errors: with letters
in the different voice, they made 38.0%
32 ANNE M. TREISMAN AND JENEFER G. A. RILEY
errors and with letters in the same voice,
28.2% errors. With letters on the attended
channel they averaged 42.2% errors and with
letters on the unattended channel, 23.9%.
Neither of these differences quite reaches
significance. The lower proportion of errors
on the unattended channel could be explained
as follows: Since detection is more difficult
on the unattended channel, only the most
clear and audible targets will be detected.
Therefore, these also will be likely to have
higher intelligibility and be less confusable
acoustically with other letters of the alpha-
bet. The errors which did occur were mostly
acoustic confusions such as P or T for C,
and F for S.
Although the authors had tried to match
the loudness of letters, there were large vari-
ations in the percentage of detections for
different individual letters in the same voice,
unattended ear, ranging from 94% correct
for L to 12.5% for X. The letter L (which
occurred in two lists) was detected excep-
tionally often (no other letter was detected
on more than 33% of occasions). Subjec-
tively, it stood out from the lists in clarity,
intensity, and tone quality. The corrected
estimates for target detections omitting the
Ls in both attended and unattended ears
would be 72.3% and 12.6%, respectively,
which may give a more accurate estimate of
detection probabilities based only on dis-
crimination of purely phonemic features.
The right and left ear groups detected ap-
proximately the same number of targets in
the attended ear (Cond. AS), but in Cond.
NS rather more targets were detected from
the right ear by the group shadowing the left
ear than from the left ear by the group
shadowing the right (38.8% compared to
28.0%). The difference is not significant,
but is consistent with previous findings that
asymmetry between the ears occurs pri-
marily with stimuli not receiving full atten-
tion (Treisman & Geffen, 1968). The 5s
in the left ear group also were worse at
shadowing than those in the right ear group
(66.3% compared to 76.6%), t (14) = 3.07,
p < .01.
The control 5s, who did not have to tap
to the target letters, got significantly more
items correct in the shadowing, t (22) =
2.72, p < .02, but the difference in the num-
ber of intrusions from the unattended ear
was not significant. Each control 5" was
matched with two experimental 5s for ear
and order of trials and his shadowing was
scored only on items up to the mean point
at which the two experimental 5s had de-
tected the target letter in each list. This
avoids any bias due to scoring ends of lists
every time for control 5s and only occasion-
ally for experimental 5s (in case there is
any consistent decrement or improvement in
shadowing the second part of a list).
The present 5s switched to make intru-
sions much more often than 5s in earlier
experiments using coherent prose, who typi-
cally gave no intrusions at all, or using
random numbers not computer synchronized,
where 5s tested with the same presentation
rate of 1.8 pairs per second had only 1.7%
intrusions (an earlier experiment by Treis-
man *). Apart from the higher rate of in-
trusions from the wrong ear, the efficiency
of shadowing was about the same for the
present experiment and the earlier one using
random numbers (the omissions and errors
were 9.9% in the earlier experiment, com-
pared with the present control 5s' 10.8%).
This is consistent with the idea that the
intelligibility of the digits was approximately
the same in both experiments, but that selec-
tion of the appropriate ear is more difficult
with accurately synchronized speech.
DISCUSSION
The significantly higher probability of detec-
tion for targets in the same voice on the at-
tended compared to the unattended ear confirms
the hypothesis of a perceptual limit in this type
of selective listening1 task. It shows that the
previous results by Treisman and Geffen
(1967) cannot be an artifact of the requirement
to repeat as well as tap to words in the at-
tended message. Neither can this requirement
explain the difference between Lawson's (1966)
results with tones as targets and the present
results with words. A similar discrepancy
arises in the present experiment if one com-
pares the results with targets in the same voice
and in the different voice. Detection of tar-
gets in the different voice was quite unaffected
*A. M. Treisman. Unpublished experiments,
1961.
 SELECTIVITY OF RESPONSE AND PERCEPTION
by the direction of attention which, however,
markedly affected the detection probabilities
for targets in the same voice. This difference
cannot be due to any difference in relative im-
portance, memory load, motivation, or response
competition. The most plausible account would
seem to be in terms of Broadbent's filter model
which assumes that general physical differences
in this type of task are detected before any
selection is made. Where detection of the
targets requires discrimination of phonemic
features, 5s are much impaired when they
must simultaneously identify another competing
verbal item. This is not to imply, of course,
that there may not also be limits to the dis-
crimination of simultaneous nonverbal signals
when these are near threshold or when they re-
quire more complex analysis.
Does the finding that 5s could correctly name
62% of targets in the different voice contra-
dict this account by implying that 5s were
using phonemic analysis to detect targets in the
different voice as well as in the same voice?
A more plausible alternative account is that
they first detected the occurrence of a target
by the different physical characteristics of the
voice and then immediately identified the letter
from the surviving memory trace. This would
be possible since there was no competing task
requirement once the target had occurred. The
lower proportion of detected targets, which
also were correctly named with the different
compared to the same voice, is consistent with
this account since identification of the particu-
lar letter was not essential to the detection task
with the different voice. One can explain the
28% naming errors on correctly detected tar-
gets in the same voice, on the assumption that
5s identified sufficient phonemic features to
distinguish the letter from all digits, but in
some cases had insufficient evidence to dis-
tinguish between alternative acoustically con-
fusable letters.
The present 5s did detect a considerably
higher proportion of unattended targets than
those in our previous experiment, an estimated
33% compared to 8%. This difference might
be explained by Deutsch and Deutsch's (1967)
suggestion that our previous experiment did
not completely equate the importance of at-
tended and unattended targets. Alternatively,
it could be due partly to the artifactual high
detectability of the letter L targets, and chiefly
to the difference in the material shadowed, and
the much higher proportion of words correctly
shadowed in the previous experiment. The
estimates in the present experiment correct only
33
for the proportion of overt intrusions 5s made
from the wrong ear. If they also had switched
their attention during all the omissions and
errors, the estimated probability of detection
would be only 14.6% on the unattended ear.
The proportion of target letters detected here
was lower than the proportion with zero delay
in Peterson and Kroener's (1964) experiment,
but was approximately the same as the pro-
portion at longer delays of 1-2 sec. This is
consistent with the suggestion made earlier that
Peterson and Kroener's 5s with the zero delay
could shift their attention to a memory trace of
the last item on the unattended ear. When
this was not possible, because the target oc-
curred before the end of the attended list, SB
detected roughly the same proportion of target
letters as in the present experiment. Peterson
and Kroener scored only correctly shadowed
lists, therefore no correction for shifting at-
tention was necessary.
The much lower probability of detecting tar-
gets in the same voice than in the different
voice, even on the attended ear, needs some ex-
planation. In fact, it is quite consistent with
the account given so far. Since detection of
targets in a different voice does not require any
phonemic analysis, it does not depend on the
intelligibility of the letters and digits. For tar-
gets in the same voice, it would be surprising
if the proportion detected were much higher
than the proportion correctly shadowed since
both responses depend on identifying the verbal
content. In fact the proportions are almost
identical70% (uncorrected) target detections
on the attended ear and 71.5% correctly shad-
owed. The absence of correlation over indi-
vidual SB between shadowing and tapping
scores is not inconsistent with this since it
implies that, given constant intelligibility, some
5s concentrated more on the shadowing re-
sponse and some on detecting the targets, al-
though the two tasks were not sufficiently in-
compatible to give a negative correlation.
A separate point of interest is the high pro-
portion of intrusions with these computer-
synchronized digits. The switching was not
caused primarily by 5s attempting to monitor
the other list for target letters since control
5s, who did not have to detect the targets,
got only slightly and not significantly fewer
intrusions. There are two possible explana-
tions which are not necessarily incompatible.
First, 5s find it difficult to identify which ear
a sound is coming to unless at least part of it
coincides with silence on the other ear. Sec-
ond, synchrony of onset encourages 5s to func-
34 ANNE M. TREISMAN AND JENEFER G. A. RILEY
tion as a "single channel" rather than two
separate channels and to take in the pair of
items as a single stimulus as if both were pre-
sented binaurally instead of dichotically. This
suggestion finds considerable support in recent
findings by Day (1968) who investigated the
fusion response to pairs of synchronized speech
stimuli on the two ears. Her 6"s were asked
to report what they heard, and a high propor-
tion of their responses incorporated phonemes
from both ears. For example, Ss responded
"black" when presented with "back" on one ear
and "lack" on the other. This tendency in-
creased when most of the phonemes were the
same in the two ears and, also, when the fusion
response resulted in a permissible linguistic
unit. Although fusion responses are less likely
with stimuli that are quite different phoneti-
cally, like the digits used in the present ex-
periment, the speech sounds may be less clearly
segregated by ear of arrival and the probability
of selecting the wrong one of the two to iden-
tify is higher than with normal speech syn-
chronized only by the human ear. This sugges-
tion of single channel intake with synchronized
speech is not meant to imply that 6"s identify
both stimuli, but that the selection of which
to identify is less consistently determined by
ear of arrival.
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