Submission 148
The Cocktail Party Effect in Children: Two Classic Results and a New One
Posterwall-24
Presented by: Jan Philipp Röer
This poster presents a preregistered replication of the classical cocktail party phenomenon in children, investigating attention scope and control during elementary school years. How often should children notice their own names in an ignored speech channel? A priori, either direction of difference from younger adults could be expected, one effect based on the scope of attention (children should notice their names less often because of their lower capacity to apprehend multiple items simultaneously), and the opposite effect based on the control of attention (children should notice their names more often because of their poorer ability to suppress information in the irrelevant channel). A retrospective questionnaire indicated that 29 percent of the younger group (6.4 years), 43 percent of the middle group (8.2 years), and 25 percent of the older group (11.7 years) noticed their own name and those who did made more shadowing errors shortly after the presentation of the name, with no simple developmental trend and no relation to individual differences in working memory capacity.