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| Edward 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 at