... theories have been subsequently suggested which shall be considered briefly. Human and animals cannot process all sensory information from the environment because they have a limited capacity system, we know this because human performance suffers when overloaded by multiple inputs, i.e. when trying to drive a car and talk on the phone it is difficult to attend fully to both stimuli. This means "decisions" have to be made about what to process, we therefore selectively attend, but the question is do we attend early or late in the sensory information processing system? Early selection is the concept that a stimulus does not need to be completely perceptually encoded and analysed as categorical or semantic information before it is selected for further processing or rejected as irrelevant (Gazzaniga (1998)). Cherry (1953) devised a dichotic listening task (presentation of two messages, one to each ear) to try to solve the "cocktail party" problem. ...

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