Selective auditory attention or selective hearing is a type of selective attention and involves the auditory system. Selective hearing is characterized as the action in which people focus their attention intentionally on a specific source of a sound or spoken words. When people use selective hearing, noise from the surrounding environment is heard by the auditory system but only certain parts of the auditory information are chosen to be processed by the brain. Most often, auditory attention is directed at things people are most interested in hearing. Selective hearing is not a physiological disorder but rather it is the capability of humans to block out sounds and noise. It is the notion of ignoring certain things in the surrounding environment. The dividing line between preference and utility is not clear cut. Selective auditory attention differs from selective perception, in that the filtering in the latter case is mediated by cognitive dissonance. Background In an article by Krans, Isbell, Giuliano, and Neville (2013), selective auditory attention is defined as the ability to acknowledge some stimuli while ignoring other stimuli that is occurring at the same time. An example of this is a student focusing on a teacher giving a lesson and ignoring the sounds of classmates in a rowdy classroom (p. 53). This is an example of bottlenecking which means that information cannot be processed simultaneously so only some sensory information gets through the "bottleneck" and is processed. A brain simply cannot process all sensory information that is occurring in an environment so only the most relevant and important information is thoroughly processed by the brain. There have been some models that theorize the pathway of selective auditory attention, notably the early selection model, late selection model, and attenuation model. History Early researches on selective auditory attention can be traced back to 1953, when Colin Cherry introduced the "cocktail party problem". At the time, air traffic controllers at the control tower received messages from pilots through loudspeakers. Hearing mixed voices through a single loudspeaker made the task very difficult. In Cherry's experiment, mimicking the problem faced by air traffic controllers, participants had to listen to two messages played simultaneously from one loudspeaker and repeat what they heard. This was later termed the dichotic listening task. Though introduced by Colin Cherry, Donald Broadbent is often regarded as the first to systematically apply dichotic listening tests in his research. Broadbent used the method