Paris Hilton may or may not be aware of this, but when she blocks out all the simultaneous chatter and background noise at a cocktail party to focus on a single speaker in a group, she’s demonstrating an auditory processing ability that has proven extremely difficult for neuroscientists to model and roboticists to replicate.

This natural ability that allows Paris—and the rest of us—to separate and process single sound sources amidst numerous, simultaneous incoming sounds is known as the “cocktail party effect” among cognitive psychologists and neuroscientists. Among roboticists tasked with the challenge of helping robots achieve the same effect, however, it’s better known as “the cocktail party problem.”