Education
The participant must then shadow this attended message.
The participant must then shadow this attended message.
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. 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 educated at Street Albans School and Northampton Polytechnic (now City University) gaining his Bachelor of Science 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 Doctor of Science 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).