Imagine the situation. You're at a party. Loud music is playing, there are a lot of people around: on the sofas, in the corridor, at the bar. The presenter is saying something on stage. Waiters constantly pass by you, serving drinks and snacks. Meanwhile, you calmly carry on a conversation about the latest events at work with your friends. You can hear them perfectly, although they do not scream. You delve into what they want to convey. How is it that you don’t perceive everything else around you? Let's learn about the “party effect”, which was discovered by psychologists. When talking about a person’s behavior at a party, we are talking, first of all, about attention. When such a mental process as attention became an active subject of study by scientists, several concepts of its behavior were created. In one of these concepts, attention was understood as a filter that cuts off information that is unnecessary at a given time. This filter model was proposed by psychologist D. Broadbent. Thus, a person filters the information he receives and perceives only what is important at a certain moment. We hear what a friend at a party answers to us because it is important and interesting for us to get an answer to our question. But what happens when suddenly someone at a party calls out to us? Let it be quiet. Let it be from the other end of the hall. Most likely, we will hear it immediately and will stop hearing our friend’s answer. The “channel of information” (as psychologists call it) will change and attention will switch to something else. The same thing will happen if people nearby begin to discuss some topic that is significant to you. If earlier other conversations were perceived as noise, now you involuntarily distinguish between words and phrases, and begin to listen to what meanings people want to convey. We move on to something else. Our attention switches. When we focus (whether voluntarily or involuntarily) on something, the rest fades into the background. That is why at a party, loud music, running waiters, and competitions for the host do not disturb friends from communicating. This all happens in the background while a person directs attention to a specific object. This is the "party effect"».