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 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 Semantics (from grc, σημαντικός ''sēmantikós'', "significant") is the study of reference, meaning, or truth. The term can be used to refer to subfields of several distinct disciplines, including philosophy, linguistics and comput ...

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 research with the British

Ministry of Aircraft Production Ministry may refer to: Government * Ministry (collective executive), the complete body of government ministers under the leadership of a prime minister * Ministry (government department), a department of a government Religion * Christian ...

, he taught at the Manchester College of Technology and then Imperial College London. He was awarded the D.Sc. in 1956 and presented the

Bernard Price Memorial Lecture The Bernard Price Memorial Lecture is the premier annual lecture of the South African Institute of Electrical Engineers. It is of general scientific or engineering interest and is given by an invited guest, often from overseas, at several of the m ...

in 1958. From 1957 until 1966, he served as one of three founding editors of

Information and Control ''Information and Computation'' is a closed-access computer science journal published by Elsevier (formerly Academic Press). The journal was founded in 1957 under its former name ''Information and Control'' and given its current title in 1987. , t ...

. He was appointed to the Chair of Telecommunications 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 {{UK-scientist-stub