Neville Moray

Neville Moray

Psychologist whose 1959 dichotic listening study found that one's own name breaks through a message one has been told to ignore.

Who they are

Moray used Colin Cherry's shadowing task, in which listeners repeat aloud one of two messages played to separate ears. His 1959 paper in the Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology found that almost nothing from the rejected message was retained, and that even a short list of words played repeatedly left no trace on a later recognition test. His abstract ends: "The only stimulus so far found that will break through this barrier is the subject's own name." About a third of his participants, 33 per cent, heard theirs.

This is the result usually meant by the cocktail party effect. Replications found 34.6 per cent in 1995 and 29 per cent in a preregistered study in 2021. The Choice Factory does not name him and credits the finding to Cherry.

Key papers

Moray, N. (1959). "Attention in dichotic listening: affective cues and the influence of instructions." Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology, 11(1), 56-60. doi:10.1080/17470215908416289.

Key ideas

See The Cocktail Party Effect.

Sources

  1. Moray (1959), abstract read (SAGE page), 12 October 2026.
  2. The 33 per cent detection rate as reported in Conway, Cowan and Bunting (2001), full text read, 12 October 2026.