Science · Attention · 1953
Two Ears, One Name
A listener is asked to repeat one voice while another voice speaks into the other ear. Most of the ignored speech is lost. A name sometimes is not.
- Imperial College, London
- Mid-century laboratory
- 51.50°N 0.18°W
Motion · Ambient plate · Generated interpretation
Two voices. Which one do you keep?
Listen · Eve
0:00 / —:—
E. Colin Cherry, in “Some Experiments on the Recognition of Speech, with One and with Two Ears,” Journal of the Acoustical Society of America 25 (1953), asks listeners to “shadow” a spoken message in one ear while a second message arrives in the other. The task is ordinary in one sense: a crowded room, two conversations. It is not ordinary as a measurement. Subjects can follow the shadowed voice. Of the rejected ear they can say little: they notice that speech is happening; they miss words, language, even, in Cherry’s report, when the ignored voice switches from English to German.
Cherry names the difficulty in the first paragraph as the “cocktail party problem.” The paper is an experimental report from Imperial College, not a theory of consciousness. The later literature on one’s own name breaking through the unattended channel is a subsequent finding, not Cherry’s 1953 result.
What the 1953 work shows is selection under load. Attention, here, is not a lamp on an inner stage. It is a practiced refusal: one stream kept, one stream let go. The letting-go is incomplete. That incompleteness is the interesting remainder, and it is easy to over-read.
Dichotic shadowing became a method. Later work (Moray and others) asked what leaks. A name sometimes leaks. Most content does not. The leak is not a proof that “the unconscious heard everything.” It is a limit on how thoroughly a second voice can be dropped.
James had called attention a taking-possession. Cherry gives the taking a pair of ears and a stopwatch. The party is a metaphor. The headphones are not.
Whether the unattended stream is experienced and forgotten, or never taken as experience at all, is not settled by a shadowing score.
A word
attend
Latin attendere, to stretch toward. Cherry’s listeners stretch toward one voice. The other voice is not thereby proved to be a second self.
Distant echoes
Echo
Gilded Age America · Cambridge, Massachusetts
The stream of thought
James said attention is a stretch toward. Cherry asked what happens to the voice you do not stretch toward.
One question remains
Attention · What enters awareness?
When a name reaches you from a conversation you were not in, was that awareness arriving late, or a different kind of hearing that never became yours to report?