Researchers find head turning resets cocktail party effect

(Medical Xpress) -- Anyone who has ever been to a cocktail party knows how difficult it can be to hear and follow conversations due to a host of distracting noises. Some might have even noticed that if they focus on a person talking, that after a few seconds, it seems to become easier to follow what they are saying. That’s the basis for what researchers call, the “cocktail party effect.” But how and why it works, and sometimes doesn’t is still poorly understood. To find out more, a team of Japanese researchers from NTT Communication Science Laboratories conducted a series of experiments and found, as they report in their paper published in the Proceedings of National Academy of Sciences, that something as innocuous as moving one’s head can upset the cocktail party effect, forcing the listener to once again focus and wait for the clearing-up to kick in again.