<P> The cocktail party effect is the phenomenon of the brain 's ability to focus one 's auditory attention ( an effect of selective attention in the brain ) on a particular stimulus while filtering out a range of other stimuli , as when a partygoer can focus on a single conversation in a noisy room . Listeners have the ability to both segregate different stimuli into different streams , and subsequently decide which streams are most pertinent to them . Thus , it has been proposed that one 's sensory memory subconsciously siphons through all stimuli , and when an important word or phrase with high meaning appears , it stands out to the listener . This effect is what allows most people to `` tune into '' a single voice and `` tune out '' all others . It may also describe a similar phenomenon that occurs when one may immediately detect words of importance originating from unattended stimuli , for instance hearing one 's name in another conversation during a cocktail party . </P>
the ability to focus on one voice and tune out other voices involves
cocktail party effect