Cherry (1953) compared selective attention for dichotic and binaural stimulus presentation. He found:

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Question restatement: Cherry (1953) compared selective attention for dichotic and binaural stimulus presentation. He found which of the following?

Option 1: 'The binaural task was harder than the dichotic task because presentation of two messages in the same voice caused acoustic confusion.' This suggests that the difficulty arose from having two messages in the same voice causing confusion, but Cherry’s findings emphasized the issue of localisation cues rather than merely voice identity, so this option misattributes the source of difficulty.

Option 2: 'The dichotic task was harder than the binaural task because presentation of two messages in the same voice caused acoustic confusion.' Here the claim is reversed about which setup increases confusion, and it also specifies same-voice confusion as the cause. The original result did not indicate dichotic tasks being harder due to that factor, making this option unlikely.

Option 3: 'The binaural task was harder than the dichotic task because it provided no source localisation cues.' This aligns with a key interpretation of Cherry’s work: binaural presentation, which lacks distinct spatial separation cues available in dichotic setup, reduces available localisation information and thus increases attentional load or difficulty. This reasoning matches the classical account that localisation cues facilitate selective attention.

Option 4: 'The dichotic task was harder than the binaural task because it provided no source localisation cues.' This would imply that fewer localisation cues in the dichotic condition made it harder, which contradicts the typical interpretation that binaural presentation removes spatial separation cues and poses greater separation demands. The dichotic condition, with presented separately to each ear, actually preserves some localisation advantages relative to the binaural arrangement, so this claim is inconsistent with the expected findings.

Option-by-option synthesis: The first option ties difficulty to same-voice acoustic confusion in the binaural case, which is not the primary conceptual driver in Cherry’s comparison of selective attention across dichotic vs. binaural presentations. The second option flips the comparison incorrectly and relies on a confound (same-voice confusion) that does not reflect the core result. The third option correctly identifies the key distinction—absence of source localisation cues in the binaural condition—and explains why that would render the task harder. The fourth option misattributes the source of difficulty to the dichotic condition and misstates the localisation cue availability.

Conclusion incorporated in reasoning: Considering the core idea that source localisation cues help segregate competing messages, and that binaural presentation lacks spatial cues leading to greater difficulty in selective attention, the third option is the one that coherently maps to Cherry’s reported finding. The other options either invert the difficulty relationship, misstate the role of localisation cues, or introduce alternative confounds not supported by the described result.

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Cherry (1953) compared selective attention for dichotic and binaural stimulus presentation. He found:

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