The Cocktail Party Effect in Auditory Interfaces: A Study of Simultaneous Presentation

Researchers have proposed building auditory interfaces that make use of the “cocktail party effect”—the human’s ability to selectively attend to a single talker or stream of audio among a cacophony of others—to reduce the amount of time required to listen [Arons 1992, Cohen 1992, Mullins 1993]. The premise is that by presenting multiple streams of audio simultaneously, the user will be able to focus on one, yet overhear interesting information in another and easily switch attention. In this study, subjects listen to multiple channels of audio and perform two tasks simultaneously—listening comprehension and target monitoring. While listening to one passage of speech, the subject must identify target words in one or two other passages played simultaneously. The results showed that the subject’s performance, both listening comprehension and target monitoring, decreased significantly as the number of simultaneous audio channels increased.