The cocktail party effect refers to the brain's ability to filter out "background noise" and focus on one stimulus or certain stimuli in an environment. The interesting aspect comes in when we consider that, though we may be seemingly focusing our attention on the conversation at hand, if someone at the party calls out our name, our attention will snap towards said person. In this way, the effect is considered to be an example of late selection since we are seemingly processing everything in our environment semantically before the attentional filter.