Dichotic listening

Dichotic listening is a psychological test commonly used in the study of cognitive psychology to investigate selective attention within the auditory system. It is used as a behavioral test for auditory processing disorder and is a subtopic of cognitive psychology.

Overview

In a typical dichotic listening test, a participant is presented with two different auditory stimuli simultaneously (usually speech), directed into different ears over headphones. The participant is then asked to attend to one of the two stimuli.

History

The dichotic listening task was developed by Broadbent, D.E. in 1954 as a technique to study selective attention. The task has been used extensively in cognitive psychology research and has provided valuable information about how people selectively attend to information and ignore irrelevant information.

Procedure

In a typical dichotic listening task, the participant wears a set of headphones. Different auditory stimuli, usually sentences or numbers, are presented to each ear. The participant is instructed to attend to the information in one ear (the attended channel) and ignore the information in the other ear (the unattended channel).

Findings

Research using the dichotic listening task has found that people are better at recalling information presented to the attended channel than the unattended channel. This finding supports the idea of selective attention, the ability to focus on one source of information while ignoring other simultaneous sources of information.

Applications

The dichotic listening task has been used in research to study a variety of topics in cognitive psychology, including attention, memory, and language processing. It is also used clinically to assess auditory processing disorder.

See also

• Cognitive psychology
• Selective attention
• Auditory processing disorder