Colin Cherry
British scientist whose 1953 paper on recognising speech with one and two ears set up the dichotic listening method and named the cocktail party problem.
Who they are
Cherry's 1953 paper in the Journal of the Acoustical Society of America lists him at Imperial College, University of London, and MIT. He played two messages at once, one to each ear, and asked listeners to repeat one of them aloud as they heard it, a task known as shadowing. Listeners nearly always noticed when the voice in the ignored ear changed from a man's to a woman's, but could not report a word of what it had said. When the ignored message switched from English to German, one listener assumed it had been English throughout.
He used the phrase "cocktail party problem" for the puzzle of following one speaker among many. Popular accounts, including The Choice Factory, credit him with the finding that people hear their own name in a conversation they are ignoring. That result came from Neville Moray in 1959, using Cherry's shadowing task.
Key papers
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, 975-979. doi:10.1121/1.1907229.
Key ideas
See The Cocktail Party Effect.
Sources
- Cherry (1953), full text read, 12 October 2026.
- Shotton, R. (2018), The Choice Factory, Bias 24, pp. 159 to 165, read in full by this publication.