The relative intelligibility threshold for one's own name compared with other names

Two recent experiments (Moray, 1959; Oswald, Taylor and Treisman, 1960) have shown that in dichotic listening, and in sleep one's own name seems to be responded to selectively. We have shown for 10 subjects, each listening binaurally to the same recording of a list of their names repeated at random 10 times, and masked by noise, that the subject's own name had a significantly lower threshold than other names. The effect we found was not significantly different from the one found by Oswald et al. during sleep and by Moray for the dichotic situation.

These three experiments taken together suggest that the same pattern-analysing mechanism is involved in normal listening, dichotic listening to the rejected message, and in discrimination during sleep.     

On the failure to eliminate hypotheses in a conceptual task

This investigation examines the extent to which intelligent young adults seek (i) confirming evidence alone (enumerative induction) or (ii) confirming and discontinuing evidence (eliminative induction), in order to draw conclusions in a simple conceptual task. The experiment is designed so that use of confirming evidence alone will almost certainly lead to erroneous conclusions because (i) the correct concept is entailed by many more obvious ones, and (ii) the universe of possible instances (numbers) is infinite.

Six out of 29 subjects reached the correct conclusion without previous incorrect ones, 13 reached one incorrect conclusion, nine reached two or more incorrect conclusions, and one reached no conclusion. The results showed that those subjects, who reached two or more incorrect conclusions, were unable, or unwilling to test their hypotheses. The implications are discussed in relation to scientific thinking.