A comparison between listening to and shadowing a play for selective attention.

One of the problems associated with shadowing when studying selective attention is that the subject's own voice interferes with the other messages in the dichotic listening task. The present study compared shadowing with just listening to a play about which the subjects were questioned afterward. In the secondary channel subjects heard another play that had to be ignored. A digit monitoring task performed at the same time on both channels showed that virtually no digits could be monitored on the secondary channel during shadowing. Digit detection was much lower on the secondary channel compared with that on the primary channel for subjects listening to the primary channel, but listening produced higher digit detection rates on the primary channel compared with shadowing. The other main findings were first, that the number of digits detected on both channels by subjects listening to the play was inversely related to their performance on a comprehension test and second, that it was likely that for a proportion of the time, at least, listeners were listening to both messages simultaneously.