Colin Cherry
Encyclopedia
Edward Colin Cherry was a British
cognitive scientist
whose main contributions were in focused auditory
attention, specifically regarding the cocktail party problem
. This concerns the problem of following only one conversation while many other conversations are going on around us. 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 attend to.
He was 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
research with the British Ministry of Aircraft Production, he taught at the Manchester College of Technology and then Imperial College, London. He was awarded the D.Sc. in 1956 and was appointed to the Chair of Telecommunications at Imperial College in 1968. In 1978 he was elected to a Marconi International Fellowship. His writings include On Human Communication (1957) and World Communication: Threat or Promise (1971)
United Kingdom
The United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern IrelandIn the United Kingdom and Dependencies, other languages have been officially recognised as legitimate autochthonous languages under the European Charter for Regional or Minority Languages...
cognitive scientist
Cognitive science
Cognitive science is the interdisciplinary scientific study of mind and its processes. It examines what cognition is, what it does and how it works. It includes research on how information is processed , represented, and transformed in behaviour, nervous system or machine...
whose main contributions were in focused auditory
Auditory system
The auditory system is the sensory system for the sense of hearing.- Outer ear :The folds of cartilage surrounding the ear canal are called the pinna...
attention, specifically regarding the cocktail party problem
Source separation
Source separation problems in digital signal processing are those in which several signals have been mixed together and the objective is to find out what the original signals were. The classical example is the "cocktail party problem", where a number of people are talking simultaneously in a room ,...
. This concerns the problem of following only one conversation while many other conversations are going on around us. 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
Semantics
Semantics is the study of meaning. It focuses on the relation between signifiers, such as words, phrases, signs and symbols, and what they stand for, their denotata....
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 attend to.
He was educated at St Albans School
St Albans School (Hertfordshire)
St Albans School is an independent school in the city of St Albans in Hertfordshire, in the East of England. Entry before Sixth Form is for boys only, and co-educational thereafter. Founded in 948 by Wulsin , St Albans School is not only the oldest school in Hertfordshire but also one of the oldest...
and Northampton Polytechnic (now City University) gaining his B.Sc. in 1936. After the war, during which he worked on radar
Radar
Radar is an object-detection system which uses radio waves to determine the range, altitude, direction, or speed of objects. It can be used to detect aircraft, ships, spacecraft, guided missiles, motor vehicles, weather formations, and terrain. The radar dish or antenna transmits pulses of radio...
research with the British Ministry of Aircraft Production, he taught at the Manchester College of Technology and then Imperial College, London. He was awarded the D.Sc. in 1956 and was appointed to the Chair of Telecommunications at Imperial College in 1968. In 1978 he was elected to a Marconi International Fellowship. His writings include On Human Communication (1957) and World Communication: Threat or Promise (1971)