The ability to pay attention to one message and ignore others, yet hear distinctive features of the unattended messages.
Explanation:
In psychology, the term cocktail party effect refers to the phenomenon by which <u>the brain can focus its attention on a particular stimulus while filtering out the other stimuli that are not relevant to it.</u> This phenomenon happens especially at places where there's a lot of noise where the listener is able to focus his/her attention in one particular stimulus. However,<u> if there is a distinctive stimulus (like someone saying your name) you can hear this part of the message</u> even if your attention is focused somewhere else.
Therefore, we can conclude that the cocktail party effect is the ability to pay attention to one message and ignore others, yet hear distinctive features of the unattended messages.
