selective attention indicate that infants favor "baby" talk over speech with an adult tone. This preference indicates that infants can recognize physical changes in the tone of speech. However, the accuracy in noticing these physical differences, like tone, amid background noise improves over time. Infants may simply ignore stimuli because something like their name, while familiar, holds no higher meaning to them at such a young age. However, research suggests that the more likely scenario is that infants do not understand that the noise being presented to them amidst distracting noise is their own name, and thus do not respond. The ability to filter out unattended stimuli reaches its prime in young adulthood. In reference to the cocktail party phenomenon, older adults have a harder time than younger adults focusing in on one conversation if competing stimuli, like "subjectively" important messages, make up the background noise. Some examples of messages that catch people's attention include personal names and taboo words. The ability to selectively attend to one's own name has been found in infants as young as 5 months of age and appears to be fully developed by 13 months. Along with multiple experts in the field, Anne Treisman states that people are permanently primed to detect personally significant words, like names, and theorizes that they may require less perceptual information than other words to trigger identification. Another stimulus that reaches some level of semantic processing while in the unattended channel is taboo words. These words often contain sexually explicit material that cause an alert system in people that leads to decreased performance in shadowing tasks. Taboo words do not affect children in selective attention until they develop a strong vocabulary with an understanding of language. Selective attention begins to waver as we get older. Older adults have longer latency periods in discriminating between conversation streams. This is typically attributed to the fact that general cognitive ability begins to decay with old age (as exemplified with memory, visual perception, higher order functioning, etc.). Even more recently, modern neuroscience techniques are being applied to study the cocktail party problem. Some notable examples of researchers doing such work include Edward Chang, Nima Mesgarani, and Charles Schroeder using electrocorticography; Jonathan Simon, Mounya Elhilali, Adrian KC Lee, Shihab Shamma, Barbara Shinn-Cunningham, Daniel Baldauf, and Jyrki Ahveninen using magnetoencephalography; Jyrki Ahveninen, Edmund Lalor, and Barbara Shinn-Cunningham using electroencephalography; and Jyrki Ahveninen and Lee M. Miller