In a dichotic-listening paradigm, reaction time was used to monitor the effect of selective attention for 8 Ss. Reaction times were longer for targets in the non-attended channel, but there was no difference between the performance in the attended channel and a divided attention condition which may be interpreted as evidence for attenuation of the unattended channel. For all conditions the reaction time for semantic stimuli is longer than that for tonal stimuli, and there is an interaction between stimulus type and attentional condition which may indicate a stimulus-processing component in selective attention.
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