Gatecrashing the Visual Cocktail Party: How Visual and Semantic Similarity Modulate the Own Name Benefit in the Attentional Blink

The "visual cocktail party effect" refers to superior report of a participant's own name, under conditions of inattention. An early selection account suggests this advantage stems from enhanced visual processing (Treisman, 1960; Shapiro, Caldwell & Sorensen, 1997). A late selection account suggests the advantage occurs when semantic information allowing identification as ones own name is retrieved (Deutsch & Deutsch 1963; Mack & Rock 1998). In the context of Inattentional Blindness (IB) the advantage does not generalise to a minor modification of a participants own name, despite extensive visual similarity, supporting the late selection account (Mack & Rock 1998). The current study applied the name modification manipulation in the context of the Attentional Blink (AB). Participants were presented with rapid streams of names, and identifed a white target name, whilst also reporting the presence of one of two possible probes. The probe names appeared either close (the third item following the target: lag 3), or far in time from the target (the eight item following the target: lag 8). The results revealed a robust AB; reports of the probe were reduced at lag 3 relative to lag 8. The AB was also greatly reduced for the own name compared to another name; a visual cocktail party effect. In contrast to the findings of Mack and Rock for IB the reduced AB extended to the modified own name. The results suggest different loci for the visual cocktail party effect in the AB (word recognition) compared to IB (semantic processing).