Question

You are at an office party, a holiday party, or a gathering of friends at the home of a neighbor and you are engaged in conversation with a friend in a discussion. More people are talking behind you, but you are not paying attention to their conversation. Suddenly, you hear your name mentioned by one of the individuals engaged in the conversation behind you. You become unable to concentrate on the discussion, because you are too busy trying to hear what the other people are saying about you. You know you were not deliberately eavesdropping on this conversation, but you know that you heard your name. Is it possible that you were unconsciously eavesdropping?

Answer 1

Answer.

This can be explained based on the process of selective attention which is characterized as focussing the attention on a specific source of a sound or spoken words about the listener. The sounds and noise in the surrounding environment is heard by the auditory system but only certain parts, personally meaningful units of the auditory information such as hearing one’s name, are processed in the brain. According to the bottleneck theory of attention (Krans, Isbell, Giuliano, and Neville, 2013), we become aware of some stimuli while ignoring other stimuli that is occurring at the same time, thus the term bottlenecking which means that information cannot be processed simultaneously so only some sensory information which is important gets through the "bottleneck" and is processed.