Re: groups vs streams

[Michael Norris <michaeln@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

On Tue, 22 May 2001, David Spondike wrote:

> clapper.  More fundamentally, one needs to consider the directed attention of
> the listener. One can focus on any number of individual clappers if he or she
> is close enough to the source of applause. The question then becomes: how
> distant must the listener be before any individual clapper becomes
> indistinguishable from the applause, despite the effort of any directed
> attention on the part of the listener?

Has anyone looked into what qualities of the organization of unattended
streams differ from the attended stream? I believe that the background
streams are organized to some extent because (from my own informal
experiments) you can switch attention from a foreground stream A to one
of a pair of background streams B and C in less time than it takes for
two streams to form from B and C without A (though I haven't found a
published ref for this). The question then is in what ways are the
background streams less organized than the foreground?

-m.

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