Cherry, Colin
| Line 20: | Line 20: | ||
==Major Works== | ==Major Works== | ||
| − | * Cherry, Colin E. "Some experiments on the recognition of speech with one and two ears." ''Journal of the Acoustical Society of America'' 25(1953): 975-979. | + | * Cherry, Colin E. [http://asadl.org/jasa/resource/1/jasman/v25/i5/p975_s1?isAuthorized=no "Some experiments on the recognition of speech with one and two ears."] ''Journal of the Acoustical Society of America'' 25(5) (1953): 975-979. Retrieved October 4, 2011. |
*Cherry, Colin E. ''On Human Communication: A Review, a Survey, and a Criticism''. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 1980 (original 1957). ISBN 978-0262530385 | *Cherry, Colin E. ''On Human Communication: A Review, a Survey, and a Criticism''. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 1980 (original 1957). ISBN 978-0262530385 | ||
*Cherry, Colin E. ''World Communication: Threat or Promise''. John Wiley & Sons Ltd, 1978 (original 1971). ISBN 978-0471996163 | *Cherry, Colin E. ''World Communication: Threat or Promise''. John Wiley & Sons Ltd, 1978 (original 1971). ISBN 978-0471996163 | ||
Revision as of 19:27, 4 October 2011
Edward Colin Cherry, known as Colin Cherry, (1914 – November 23, 1979) was a British cognitive scientist whose main contributions were in focused auditory attention, specifically regarding the cocktail party effect. 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.
He was 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 was appointed to the Chair of Telecommunications at Imperial College in 1968. In 1978 he was elected to a Marconi International Fellowship. His writings include On Human Communication (1957) and World Communication: Threat or Promise (1971)
Work
Cocktail Party Effect
The cocktail party effect describes the ability to focus one's listening attention on a single talker among a mixture of conversations and background noises, ignoring other conversations.[1] The effect enables most people to talk in a noisy place. For example, when conversing in a noisy crowded party, most people can still listen and understand the person they are talking with, and can simultaneously ignore background noise and conversations. Nevertheless, if someone calls out their name from across the room, people will sometimes notice (the "own name effect").[2] In the early 1950s much of the early work in this area can be traced to problems faced by air traffic controllers. At that time, controllers received messages from pilots over loudspeakers in the control tower. Hearing the intermixed voices of many pilots over a single loudspeaker made the controller's task very difficult.[3] The effect was first defined and named by Colin Cherry in 1953.[4] Cherry conducted attention experiments in which subjects were asked to listen to two different messages from a single loudspeaker at the same time and try to separate them. His work reveals that our ability to separate sounds from background noise is affected by many variables, such as the gender of the speaker, the direction from which the sound is coming, the pitch, and the rate of speech.[4]
This phenomenon is still very much a subject of research, in humans as well as in computer implementations (where it is typically referred to as source separation or blind source separation). The neural mechanism in human brains is not yet fully clear.
Major Works
- Cherry, Colin E. "Some experiments on the recognition of speech with one and two ears." Journal of the Acoustical Society of America 25(5) (1953): 975-979. Retrieved October 4, 2011.
- Cherry, Colin E. On Human Communication: A Review, a Survey, and a Criticism. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 1980 (original 1957). ISBN 978-0262530385
- Cherry, Colin E. World Communication: Threat or Promise. John Wiley & Sons Ltd, 1978 (original 1971). ISBN 978-0471996163
- Cherry, Colin E. The Age of Access: Information Technology and Social Revolution. Routledge Kegan & Paul, 1985. ISBN 978-0709934585 (edited and completed by William Edmondson)
Notes
- ↑ Bronkhorst, Adelbert W. (2000). The Cocktail Party Phenomenon: A Review on Speech Intelligibility in Multiple-Talker Conditions. Acta Acustica united with Acustica 86: 117–128.
- ↑ http://www.csun.edu/~vcpsy00h/students/arousal.htm
- ↑ Sorkin, Robert D.; Kantowitz, Barry H. (1983). Human factors: understanding people-system relationships. New York: Wiley. ISBN 0-471-09594-X.
- ↑ 4.0 4.1 Cherry, E. Colin (1953-09). Some Experiments on the Recognition of Speech, with One and with Two Ears. Journal of Acoustic Society of America 25 (5): 975–979.
ReferencesISBN links support NWE through referral fees
- Dean, Jeremy. The Cocktail Party Effect Psyblog (March 12, 2009). Retrieved October 4, 2011.
External links
- List of the papers and correspondence of COLIN CHERRY 1914 - 1979
- Edward Colin Cherry University of St Andrews
- Colin Cherry Imperial College London
- E. Collin Cherry The Marconi Socity
Credits
New World Encyclopedia writers and editors rewrote and completed the Wikipedia article in accordance with New World Encyclopedia standards. This article abides by terms of the Creative Commons CC-by-sa 3.0 License (CC-by-sa), which may be used and disseminated with proper attribution. Credit is due under the terms of this license that can reference both the New World Encyclopedia contributors and the selfless volunteer contributors of the Wikimedia Foundation. To cite this article click here for a list of acceptable citing formats.The history of earlier contributions by wikipedians is accessible to researchers here:
The history of this article since it was imported to New World Encyclopedia:
Note: Some restrictions may apply to use of individual images which are separately licensed.
