Colin Cherry

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Colin Cherry (1914 – 1979) 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. [1]