Colin Cherry

Colin Cherry
Born (1914-06-23)23 June 1914
St Albans, England
Died 23 November 1979(1979-11-23) (aged 65)
London, England
Residence England
Nationality English
Fields Electronic engineer and cognitive scientist
Institutions Hirst Research Centre
Ministry of Aircraft Production
RSRE
Manchester University
Imperial College
Alma mater Northampton Polytechnic
Academic advisors Norbert Wiener
Doctoral students Bruce Sayers
Robert Eugene Bogner
John Hugh Westcott
Adrian Fourcin[1]
Harry Levitt[2]
Other notable students George Zames
Known for Cocktail party problem

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 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[3] 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, 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 in 1958. 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).[4][5]

Bibliography


References

  1. http://americanhistory.si.edu/archives/speechsynthesis/ss_four.htm
  2. Wetherill, G. B.; Levitt, H. (May 1965). "Sequential estimation of points on a psychometric function". The British Journal of Mathematical and Statistical Psychology. 18: 1–10.
  3. O'Connor, J J; Robertson, E F. "Edward Colin Cherry". Retrieved 31 December 2012.
  4. Wilder, Carol (1977). "A Conversation with Colin Cherry". Human Communication Research. doi:10.1111/j.1468-2958.1977.tb00538.x.

External links

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