Content deafness: When coherent talk just doesn't matter

Common intuition suggests that, when people are engaged in face-to-face conversation, they diligently monitor the coherence of the messages they exchange. We present evidence showing that, contrary to this intuition, people often fail to notice cases of blatant conversational incoherence. Thirty participants engaged in spontaneous face-to-face conversations with a confederate who, 8 min into the conversation, uttered the nonsensical sentence...