Nelson Cowan

Who they are

In 1995 Noelle Wood and Cowan, at the University of Missouri, repeated Neville Moray's own-name finding with tighter controls on 34 undergraduates. 34.6 per cent recalled hearing their name in the ignored channel, and only they showed a shift of attention, for the two words after it.

In 2001 Andrew Conway, Cowan and Michael Bunting tested 40 undergraduates and found that 65 per cent of those with low working memory span heard their name, against 20 per cent with high span, which the authors read as difficulty blocking distraction. In 2021 Jan Philipp Röer and Cowan ran a preregistered replication: 29 per cent noticed their name and made more shadowing errors around it; unexpected words were rarely detected.

His wider work on short-term memory capacity puts the limit of the focus of attention nearer four chunks in young adults than George Miller's seven plus or minus two.

Key papers

Wood, N., & Cowan, N. (1995). "The cocktail party phenomenon revisited: how frequent are attention shifts to one's name in an irrelevant auditory channel?" Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition, 21(1), 255-260. doi:10.1037/0278-7393.21.1.255.

Conway, A. R. A., Cowan, N., & Bunting, M. F. (2001). "The cocktail party phenomenon revisited: the importance of working memory capacity." Psychonomic Bulletin & Review, 8(2), 331-335. doi:10.3758/BF03196169.

Röer, J. P., & Cowan, N. (2021). "A preregistered replication and extension of the cocktail party phenomenon: one's name captures attention, unexpected words do not." Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition, 47(2), 234-242. doi:10.1037/xlm0000874.

Key ideas

See Working Memory.

---