Perceptual load theory

Perceptual load theory is a psychological theory of attention. It was presented by Nilli Lavie in the mid-nineties as a potential resolution to the early/late selection debate.

This debate relates to the "cocktail party problem": how do people at a cocktail party select the conversation they are listening to and ignore the others? The models of attention proposed prior to Lavie's theory differed in their proposals for the point in the information processing stream where the selection of target information occurs, leading to a heated debate about whether the selection occurs "early" or "late". There were also arguments about to what degree distracting stimuli are processed.