Cocktail

This effect, named by E. Cherry with reference to the sound space in which we can observe it best, refers to our ability to focus attention on the speech of a specific speaker by disregarding irrelevant information coming from the surroundings. In this type of metabolic context, sound components are almost equivalent in intensity and frequency: it is their multiplication that creates the surrounding sound level. From the physical point of view, one of the predominant elements in the cocktail effect is the spatial separation of noise and speech. In consequence, we know that, on the psycho-physiological level, selective listening is governed by our capacity to discriminate sounds from different sources – that is, by our capacity to localize in the noise.