Edward Colin Cherry (23 June 1914 – 23 November 1979) was a British
cognitive scientist whose main contributions were in focused
auditory attention, specifically the
cocktail party problem
The cocktail party effect is the phenomenon of the brain's ability to focus one's auditory attention on a particular stimulus while filtering out a range of other stimuli, such as when a partygoer can focus on a single conversation in a noisy room ...
regarding the capacity to follow one conversation while many other conversations are going on in a noisy room. Cherry used shadowing tasks to study this problem, which involve playing two different auditory messages to a participant's left and right ears and instructing them to attend to only one. The participant must then shadow this attended message.
Cherry found that very little information about the unattended message was obtained by his participants: physical characteristics were detected but
semantic characteristics were not. Cherry therefore concluded that unattended auditory information receives very little processing and that we use physical differences between messages to select which one we tend.
He was born in St Albans in 1914 and educated at
St Albans School and Northampton Polytechnic (now
City University) gaining his B.Sc. in 1936. After the war, during which he worked on
radar
Radar is a detection system that uses radio waves to determine the distance ('' ranging''), angle, and radial velocity of objects relative to the site. It can be used to detect aircraft, ships, spacecraft, guided missiles, motor vehicles, we ...
research with the British
Ministry of Aircraft Production, he taught at the Manchester College of Technology and then
Imperial College London
Imperial College London (legally Imperial College of Science, Technology and Medicine) is a public research university in London, United Kingdom. Its history began with Prince Albert, consort of Queen Victoria, who developed his vision for a cu ...
. He was awarded the D.Sc. in 1956 and presented the
Bernard Price Memorial Lecture in 1958. From 1957 until 1966, he served as one of three founding editors of
Information and Control. He was appointed to the Chair of
Telecommunications
Telecommunication is the transmission of information by various types of technologies over wire, radio, optical, or other electromagnetic systems. It has its origin in the desire of humans for communication over a distance greater than that fe ...
at Imperial College in 1958. In 1978 he was elected to a Marconi International Fellowship. His writings include ''On Human Communication'' (1957) and ''World Communication: Threat or Promise'' (1971).
Bibliography
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References
External links
Focused Auditory Attention(link dead on 23/03/2013)
Cherry at the UK national archive Cherry's Imperial biography*
British cognitive scientists
Communication theorists
People educated at St Albans School, Hertfordshire
1914 births
1979 deaths
Academics of Imperial College London
People from St Albans
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