Colin Cherry

Introduction

Edward Colin Cherry (23 June 1914 - 23 November 1979) was a British electronic engineer who became one of the founding figures of cognitive science. He was not a psychologist by training: his first degree was in engineering, his early career was spent on circuit theory and radar, and he held a chair in telecommunications rather than a post in a psychology department. He belongs on a psychology site for one specific and consequential reason. In 1953 he named and began the systematic study of the "cocktail party problem," the question of how a listener follows one voice when many are speaking at once, and in doing so he supplied the experimental method and the empirical findings on which the modern psychology of attention was built.

Cherry was born in St Albans and died in London. He spent most of his career at Imperial College London, where he held the Henry Mark Pease Chair of Telecommunication. His 1953 paper on the recognition of speech with one and with two ears introduced the dichotic listening and shadowing techniques that Donald Broadbent and Anne Treisman then used to construct and dismantle the first filter theories of attention. His broader ambition was to treat communication as a single field spanning engineering, linguistics and psychology, an ambition most fully expressed in his book On Human Communication.

Early Life and Education

Cherry grew up in St Albans, about thirty kilometres north-west of London, and attended St Albans School. He left in 1932 and took a job as a laboratory assistant at the General Electric Company's research laboratories while studying in the evenings at Northampton Polytechnic in London, now City, University of London. He was awarded a BSc in engineering with first-class honours in 1936, at a time when a part-time route into electrical engineering was unusual.

He then joined the research staff at GEC, where he remained until 1945. During the Second World War that work was diverted to the war effort: Cherry carried out radar research for the Ministry of Aircraft Production at the Radar Research and Development Establishment in Malvern, and took part in flying trials. The experience gave him a working knowledge of signals, noise and bandwidth that he later transferred directly to the problem of speech.

Academic and Professional Career

After the war Cherry spent two years as an assistant lecturer at Manchester University, moving in 1947 to a lectureship in electrical engineering at Imperial College London. His interests were already shifting from circuits to communication in the broader sense. In 1952 he took sabbatical leave at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where he worked with Norbert Wiener, the mathematician who had coined the term cybernetics and whose influence runs throughout Cherry's later writing on communication as a general science.

Returning to Imperial, he was awarded a DSc in engineering in 1956, became a Reader in Telecommunication, and in 1958 was appointed Henry Mark Pease Professor of Telecommunication. His professorial inaugural lecture was pointedly titled "Telecommunication as a Social Science," and it set out the view that communication could not be understood by engineering alone. From 1957 to 1966 he served as one of three founding editors of the journal Information and Control. In 1978 he was elected to a Marconi International Fellowship, an award made for contributions to communication both in the technological sense and in terms of human perception.

Alongside the academic work he was an energetic and sometimes speculative public commentator. He published over a hundred papers, wrote major books on communication, and proposed, for example, that cars be fitted with short-range radio transmitters so that drivers could signal to one another and reduce accidents.

Major Contributions to Psychology

The cocktail party problem and the shadowing method

Cherry's entry point was practical rather than theoretical. In the early 1950s air traffic controllers received messages from several pilots over a single loudspeaker, and separating intermixed voices was a real operational difficulty. Cherry framed this as a scientific question: what makes one voice separable from another, and what happens to the voices that are not selected?

His method became standard. Participants wore headphones delivering a different spoken message to each ear, a procedure now called dichotic listening, and were asked to repeat aloud, or shadow, the message in one designated ear. Shadowing guaranteed that attention was genuinely held on the target and gave the experimenter a running record of what the listener was taking in. In variations, Cherry presented different languages in the two ears, reversed speech, substituted a pure tone for speech, or presented similar messages staggered in time.

The findings were clear and surprising. Listeners shadowed the attended message accurately but extracted very little from the unattended one. They could report gross physical properties of the ignored channel, whether the voice was male or female, whether it was speech or a tone, and whether it changed. They could not report its content, and they often failed to notice when the language changed or when the speech was played backwards. Words repeated many times in the unattended ear were not recognised. Cherry concluded that unattended material receives very little processing, and that selection is made on the basis of physical differences between the messages, such as the direction they come from, their pitch, and the sex and rate of the speaker.

Communication as a unified science

Cherry's larger project was to treat communication as one subject rather than several. On Human Communication, published in 1957 and expanded in 1966, ranged across mathematics, semantics, cybernetics, linguistics and psychology, and asked whether the apparent diversity of approaches concealed an underlying unity. He was cautious about the answer, stressing that informed opinion was genuinely divided. The book carried information theory, and Wiener's cybernetics, into the mainstream of psychological discussion of language and perception, and it made Cherry one of the conduits through which engineering concepts entered the emerging field of cognitive psychology.

One of his recurring arguments has aged particularly well. Cherry insisted that communication is not the transfer of meaning from one mind to another, because meaning cannot be put into a signal; what travels is a signal, and meaning is what the receiver constructs from it, using shared conventions and prior knowledge. He pressed this point against the casual assumption, embedded in a great deal of ordinary and technical language about communication, that messages are containers holding meanings. The argument anticipated later critiques of the so-called conduit metaphor in the study of language and influenced how psychologists think about miscommunication, since on this view failure is not a loss of content in transit but a mismatch between the constructions the two parties build.

Cherry also kept returning to the social consequences of communication technology. World Communication: Threat or Promise (1971) and the posthumous The Age of Access (1985) asked what cheap, abundant, long-distance transmission does to societies, and he was willing to make concrete policy proposals rather than keeping to generalities. For students of attention, his lasting contribution remains the narrower one: he turned an everyday puzzle into an experimental question.

Major Publications

  • Pulses and Transients in Communication Circuits (1949)
  • "Some Experiments on the Recognition of Speech, with One and with Two Ears," Journal of the Acoustical Society of America 25 (1953): 975-979
  • On Human Communication: A Review, a Survey, and a Criticism (1957; third edition 1978)
  • World Communication: Threat or Promise (1971)
  • The Age of Access: Information Technology and Social Revolution (1985), edited by William Edmondson

Impact and Legacy

Cherry's immediate legacy was methodological. The dichotic listening and shadowing paradigm he built became the standard instrument for studying attention for two decades, and the early-versus-late selection controversy that dominated attention research grew directly out of his data. Donald Broadbent took Cherry's finding, that physical properties of the ignored channel survive while meaning does not, and built a filter model on it in which a mechanism operating on simple physical features admits one channel to a limited-capacity system and blocks the other. The prediction that followed seemed secure: nothing from the unattended channel should ever be understood.

That prediction failed, and the failure is the most instructive part of Cherry's legacy. Neville Moray, using Cherry's own method, showed in 1959 that roughly a third of listeners detect their own name spoken in the unattended ear, and that instructions preceded by the listener's name are far more likely to be followed. A filter that selects only on physical features cannot account for this, because a name is not louder, higher or in a different ear than the rest of the ignored message: the only thing that distinguishes it is what it means. Anne Treisman supplied the repair with her attenuation model, proposing that the filter turns the unattended channel down rather than off, and that words differ in the threshold they need to be recognised, with personally significant words set lowest. Her 1960 work also showed that when the two messages were swapped between ears, listeners sometimes followed the meaning rather than the ear, briefly shadowing the wrong channel before correcting themselves. Later work, such as Conway and colleagues in 2001, has made the picture more nuanced still, finding that detection of one's own name in the unattended channel depends on working memory capacity, with lower-capacity listeners more likely to be captured.

Cherry's own conclusion, that unattended speech receives almost no semantic processing, is therefore no longer accepted as stated, though it is not simply wrong either: listeners still cannot report the content of the ignored message. What survives intact is the problem he posed and the instrument he invented. The cocktail party problem remains unsolved in engineering terms, since automatic speech recognition still performs far below human listeners in multi-talker conditions, and it is now studied with electrocorticography, magnetoencephalography and functional imaging.

One attribution is worth correcting. Cherry is sometimes credited with helping found signal detection theory because of his work on speech in noise. That framework was developed by others, including Peterson, Birdsall and Fox and, in psychology, Tanner and Swets, working on closely related problems. Cherry's contribution was to pose the question and supply the method, and that is contribution enough.

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References

  • Cherry, E. C. (1953). Some experiments on the recognition of speech, with one and with two ears. Journal of the Acoustical Society of America, 25(5), 975-979.

Last updated: 2026-10-20

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