Donald Broadbent and Dichotic Listening

Donald E. Broadbent has been praised for his outstanding contributions to the field of
psychology since the 1950s, most notably in the area of attention. In fact, despite the undeniable
role that attention plays in almost all psychological processes, research in this area was
neglected by psychologists for the first half of the twentieth century (Massaro, 1996). During
that time, behaviourists ignored the role of attention in human behaviour. Behaviourism was
characterized by a stimulus-response approach, emphasizing the association between a
stimulus and a response, but without identifying the cognitive operations that lead to that
response (Reed, 2000). Subsequently, in the mid-1950s, a growing number of psychologists
became interested in the information-processing approach as opposed to the stimulus-response
approach. It was Broadbent’s elaboration of the idea of the human organism as an information-
processing system that lead to a systematic study of attention, and more generally, to the
interrelation of scientific theory and practical application in the study of psychology.
Broadbent was born May 6, 1926, in Birmingham, England (American Psychological
Association, 1976). He was originally interested in the natural sciences, and thus, when he
joined the Royal Air Force (RAF) in 1944, he began his study of aeronautical engineering.
Upon this observation, Broadbent’s interests changed from the subject of engineering to that
of psychology.
At that time, however, the field of psychology was virtually unheard of in his home country of
England. It was not until Broadbent travelled across the Atlantic to the United States for flying
training that he discovered that psychology was being widely studied in North America (APA,
1976). After some time working in the personnel selection branch of the RAF, he began to
study experimental psychology at Cambridge. Fortunately for Broadbent, and for scores of
future psychologists, the psychology department at Cambridge was an especially suitable place
for him due to its natural sciences orientation and its emphasis on practical application (Craik
& Baddeley, 1995).
It was during his 25 years, from 1958 to 1974, as director of the Applied Psychology Unit that
Broadbent was able to study and define models related to his interests in the effects of
environmental stressors on cognitive performance, problems related to the detection and
understanding of speech, and problems of selective listening and attention (Craik & Baddeley,
1995). Up to that time, most research had shown that noise did not influence performance on
psychological tasks. Broadbent wondered, however, if noise would adversely influence
performance on untraditional psychological tests (APA, 1976). For instance, he discovered that
noise did have an effect on the vigilance tasks invented by N. H. Mackworth, however, these
tasks were deliberately long and repetitive, making them tedious to study.
Not only were Broadbent’s contributions to experimental psychology noteworthy for attention
research, they also contributed to belief in the need for societal relevance in research (Craik,
2000. After his death in 1993, numerous tributes and biographical acknowledgements were
written in Broadbent’s honour. Above all, he is remembered for the unmistakable image that
he projected of himself, as “the man, the scholar, the scientist, the philosopher of science, and
of his commitments to empirical psychology, to explicit models or theories, and to the
application of psychological knowledge to real-word problems” (Massaro, 1996, pp. 141). It is
with this clear image in mind that a new generation of psychologists set forth, using
Broadbent’s principles of experimental psychology as tools for practical application and
research in the area of attention, and more broadly, all psychological processes that influence
humankind.
Dichotic Listening Experiments
In 1952, Broadbent published his first report in a series of experiments that involved a dichotic
listening paradigm. In that report, he was concerned with a person’s ability to answer one of
two messages that were delivered at the same time, but one of which was irrelevant.
The participants were required to answer a series of Yes-No questions about a visual display
over a radio-telephone. For example, the participant would be asked “S-1 from G.D.O. Is there
a heart on Position 1?” Over,” to which the participant should answer “G.D.O. from S-1. Yes,
over.” Participants in groups I, II, III, and IV heard two successive series of messages, in which
two voices (G.D.O and Turret) spoke simultaneously during some of the messages. Only one
of the voices was addressing S-1, and the other addressed S-2, S-3, S-4, S-5, or S-6. Participants
were assigned to the following five groups:

• Group I: instructed to answer the message for S-1 and ignore the other on both
runs
• Group II: instructed on one run to only answer the message from G.D.O. and on
the second run was provided with a visual cue before the pairs of messages began
for the name of the voice to be answered
• Group III: were given the same directions as Group I on one run, and on the other
run had the experimenter indicate the correct voice verbally after the two messages
had reached the “over” stage
• Group IV: had the correct voice indicated in all cases, but in one run it was before
the messages began (like in Group II) and in the other run it was after the messages
had finished (like in Group III)
• Group V: under the same conditions as Group I, heard the same recordings as
Groups I, II, III and IV, but then also heard a two new recordings. One recording
had a voice that addressed S-1 and a voice that addressed T-2, T-3, T-4, T-5, or T-
6 (thus the simultaneous messages were more distinct than for the other groups).
The other recording had this same differentiation of messages, but also had both
voices repeat the call-sign portion of the message (i.e., “S-1 from G.D.O., S-1 from
G.D.O.)
For groups I and II, it is important to note that the overall proportion of failures to answer the
correct message correctly was 52%. Results from Groups III and IV indicated that delaying
knowledge of the correct voice until the message is completed makes that knowledge almost
useless. More specifically, Broadbent (1952) stated:
“The present case is an instance of selection in perception (attention). Since the visual
cue to the correct voice is useless when it arrives towards the ends of the message, it is
clear that process of discarding part of the information contained in the mixed voices
has already taken place…It seems possible that one of the two voices is selected for
response without reference to its correctness, and that the other is ignored…If one of
the two voices is selected (attended to) in the resulting mixture there is no guarantee
that it will be the correct one, and both call signs cannot be perceived at once any more
than both messages can be received and stored till a visual cue indicates the one to be
answered”. (p. 55)
In 1954, Broadbent used the same procedure as discussed above with slight modifications.
In that case, he found information that indicated the positive impact that spatial separation
of the messages has on paying attention to and understanding the correct message. The
dichotic listening paradigm has been utilized in numerous other publications, both by
Broadbent and by other psychologists working in the field of cognition. For example,
Cherry (1953) investigated how we can recognize what one person is saying when others
are speaking at the same time, which be described as the “cocktail party problem” (p. 976).
In his experiment, subjects listened to simultaneous messages and were instructed to repeat
one of the messages word by word or phrase by phrase.