Neville Moray: Listening and Attention

˝'Psychology is now a part of innumerable courses, throughout all levels of higher education.... Up to now, reading lists tended to consist of weighty, expensive and rapidly obsolescent volumes.... The Penguin science of behavior is going to blow this whole unsatisfactory situation sky-high within a fairly short time.' (Higher Education Review) In the early years of experimental psychology much research was done on the nature of attention. For several decades thereafter interest ceased, but in the 1950s there was great upsurge of research, especially on the 'cocktail-party problem', or how we select one message to listen to and ignore others. This book reviews the modern work on auditory attention, and outlines and assesses the major theories that have been put forward to explain the phenomena. It discusses the limits of attention, how fast we can switch attention, and what happens when we try to pay attention to two things at once. Recent work on the physiological mechanisms underlying attention is also discussed.˝