Final answer:
Oliver's distraction upon hearing his name is an example of the Cocktail Party Effect, indicating the brain's selective attention to personally relevant stimuli, even in a distracting environment. This effect is closely related to psychological concepts such as inattentional blindness and signal detection theory.
Step-by-step explanation:
Oliver is distracted by hearing his name. This is an example of the Cocktail Party Effect, a psychological concept within the field of attention. It refers to the brain's ability to focus one's auditory attention on a particular stimulus while filtering out a range of other stimuli, much as a partygoer can focus on a single conversation in a noisy room. However, if a stimulus is personally important such as one's own name, it can capture attention automatically, even amidst a cacophony of background noise. This phenomenon is linked with selective attention processes, where we concentrate on important stimuli while ignoring others.
Examples of selective attention can also be observed in various psychological studies and theories. For instance, inattentional blindness demonstrates how focused attention can cause us to miss other significant objects or events in our environment, as with Simons and Chabris's experiment where participants failed to notice a gorilla during a basketball game.
Motivation and the expectancy of stimuli can also influence what we attend to and perceive. This is encompassed by signal detection theory, which explains how we detect a stimulus amid background noise depending on various factors, including our psychological state and expectations.