When I was in the military, an important part of my job was to listen to radio communications and be aware of any other communication going on in the office. At first, this task was stressful but with time and practice my auditory attention was responding more efficiently. At that time I did not know that some researchers use a similar task called Dichotic Listening Task to conduct research and support their theories. In 1958, Donald Broadbent, an experimental psychologist, used Dichotic Listening Task and the results of his experiment led him to create the filter model of attention. Essentially, the task consists of presenting different stimuli to each ear. First, the participant’s task is to focus his attention to one ear, called the attended …show more content…
(2013) “Left ear advantage in detecting emotional tones using dichotic listening task” where they used Dichotic Listening Task to investigate which brain hemisphere is most likely to process emotional auditory information in Arab participants in their study. The researches selected 51 healthy college students of Arabic nationality studying in the United Kingdom. The sample included different Arab nationalities, male and female, left-handed and right-handed. The researches presented five pseudo sentences to each ear, each sentence presented in three emotional tones; angry, happy, and neutral. Then, the participants listened carefully over the headphones and reported an emotion. The emotion reported means which ear has an advantage for detecting emotional tones. The results showed that the left ear had an advantage in emotional auditory attention over the right ear. Moreover, the results showed that right-handed people are more likely to have left ear advantage in emotional auditory …show more content…
(2015) used a variant of Dichotic Listening Task with the combination of auditory attention training. Their study is “Effects of Auditory Attention Training with the Dichotic Listening Task: Behavioral and Neurophysiological Evidence”. The researcher wanted to demonstrate that the auditory attention training could change how the participant unconsciously oriented their auditory attention to the left ear. The researcher selected twenty-six right-handed, neurologically healthy participants between the ages of 20 to 34 years old. Then, the participants were randomly divided into two groups of thirteen participants. Each group attended a dichotic listening program for four weeks. One group had to report syllables presented to the left ear and the other group reported whichever syllable they heard the best. The researchers selected one group to train the left ear because the right ear is connected with the left hemisphere of the brain which processes language, resulting in little or no effort to orient the attention to the right ear. The results showed that the four weeks auditory attention training effectively increased the tendency of the participants to orient their auditory attention to the left ear without having any instruction to report to the left ear. In other words, the auditory spatial attention between the left ear and right ear can be modulated by top-down cognitive
...We also saw that memory can play an important role too, but this is not yet clearly demonstrated. Moreover some studies reveal that the congruency (vs. incongruence) of the critical stimulus can also play an important role in awareness, a phenomenon called cocktail party effect. Such phenomenon makes clear that the relevance of the stimuli plays a key role in awareness and perception. The cocktail party effect is the phenomenon of being able to focus one's auditory attention on a particular stimulus while filtering out a range of other stimuli, much the same way that one can focus on a single conversation in a noisy room and yet be able to hear if someone calls out his name or other relevant stimuli (danger words for example). Still, sometimes we fail to perceive something that is happening right in front of us. It is easy to miss something you’re not looking for.
In this documentary we get to discover the differences between our conscious and unconscious brain. This video provides us with useful information on how and why our brains act in the way they do using multiple tests to prove each point. Our brains are made of parts, like a car, and they all are needed in order to function properly. The video names the parts and the functions of each throughout the video. They use a magician’s tricks throughout the documentary to show how our brains suppress what is not in our “spotlight” attention proving that our brain can only focus on one thing at a time. If we compare this to our textbook, it says that this is called selective attention. The marshmallow test, showed in the video, helps us understand how
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Music and the Brain: Processing and Responding (A General Overview). For any individual who either avidly listens to or performs music, it is understood that many melodies have amazing effects on both our emotions and our perception. To address the effects of music on the brain, it seems most logical to initially map the auditory and neural pathways of sound. In the case of humans, the mechanism responsible for receiving and transmitting sound to the brain is the ears.
National Institute on Deafness and Other Communication Disorders. (November 2002). Retrieved October 17, 2004, from http://www.nidcd.nih.gov/health/hearing/coch.asp
Scientist has proven that humans have responded to music ever since birth. Elena Mannes, a brain scientist, has recorded the relationship with music throughout a human’s lifetime. Mannes even went far enough to say that the cries of babies just a few weeks old were discovered to have some intervals common to western music. She also states that scientists believe music stimulates more parts of the brain than any other human function. With this knowledge, she sees that music has so much potential when it comes to affecting the brain and how it works.One main area of the brain music can have a real effect on is neurological deficits (Mannes INT). For example, if a patient who just had a stroke occur and lost verbal functions, those functions can be stimulated by music. This is known as melodic intonation therapy and it could help patients regain speech. The human brain is split into two parts, the left and right hemisphere. The right hemisphere has been traditionally thought of to be the “seat of music appreciation.” However, the right side has not been proven for that role in any way (Joelving INT).
Performing well in at certain tasks and retaining information both require a high level of attention. Multitasking requires that this attention be divided amongst different tasks. As a result, the some of the attention used for a certain task must now be used for other tasks, which affects the factors needed to complete it. Referring to an experiment that was discussed earlier, Wieth and Burns (2014) stated that even with the reward, the promise of incentive could not override the limits of people’s attention. Retaining information requires undivided attention. The key word is ‘undivided.’ According to this experiment, it is nearly impossible to have the same high level of focus while working on multiple tasks that a person would while working on one task. Once someone has reached the end of their attention span, their performance begins to falter. In a final experiment involving media multitasking and attention, Ralph, Thomson, Cheyne, and Smilek (2014) stated that multitasking can lead to mind wandering and lapses in attention, which distracts people from their tasks. These results show that once their attention is divided, it can lead to distractions and difficulty completing different tasks. It is difficult to complete one assignment while focusing on several others at the same time. Multitasking affects the attention needed for a task, which can affect everything
Massaro, D. W. & Warner, D. S. (1977). Dividing attention between auditory and visual perception. Attention, Perception & Psychophysics, 21(6): 569-574.
Macleod and Mathews (1991) induced attentional biases within a laboratory setting to determine that a ca...
Rauscher, F. H., Shaw, G. L., & Ky, K. N (1993). Music and spatial task performance. Nature, 365(6447), 611. doi:10.1038/365611a0
Nowadays, it is widely known that the right and left hemisphere have different functions. The two hemispheres are equally important in a daily life basis. Nevertheless, in the 1960’s this was not common knowledge. Even though today the importance of the brain hemispheres is common knowledge, people don’t usually know to whom attribute this findings. One of the people who contributed to form a more defined picture about the brain hemispheres and their respective functions was Roger Wolcott Sperry, with the split brain research. Roger Sperry did more contributions than the split brain research, but this is his most important and revolutionary research in the psychological field. Thanks to the split brain research, Sperry proved that the two hemispheres of the brain are important, they work together and whatever side of the brain is more capable of doing the task is the hemisphere that takes the lead.
Vaidya, Geetanjali. "Music, Emotion and the Brain." Serendip. N.p., 2004. Web. 7 Jan 2012. .
The right side of the brain is good at imaginative and expressive acts. Its work is to process information for instance recognizing faces, reading emotions, expressing emotions, images, color, and creativity, just to mention but a few (Cherry, 2012). Right brain thinkers retain more information from visual experiences. On the other hand, the left side of the brain has a number of functions, which involve language, logic, and analytical thinking. The left side of the brain processes information such as; language, logic, reasoning, numbers, and critical thinking (Cherry 2012). These brain functions affect the left side of the brain, and decision-making. Both sides of the brains enhance the learning and thinking process as the brains incorporated their functions. Both sides of the brain participate in a balanced manner during the lear...
The phenomenon of ‘Divided attention’ is the idea that an individual has the ability to divide their attention between two or more tasks (multi- tasking). Focused attention models such as Broadbent’s theory, Treisman’s theory and Deutsch and Deutsch model explains how all our inputs are focused on one task at a time, however it is clear from looking at everyday life that we are able to divide our attention, successfully being able to complete more than one task at the same time.
FUN Music Company "How Does Music Stimulate Left and Right Brain Function and Why is