Perceptual Coherence : Hearing and Seeing

Preface ix
intertwined with my own that I am afraid that I have not given him appropriate
credit. I am deeply grateful to Dr. Howard Pollio, my colleague in
the Psychology Department at the University of Tennessee for 30 years.
Howard always has challenged my “mechanistic” explanations and he has
forced me to accept the essential intentionality and creativity of perceiving.
I am afraid that I will not have satisfied him or myself with what I have
been able to write here about either issue. I am also deeply grateful to
Dr. Molly L. Erickson and Dr. Sam Burchfield in the Audiology and Speech
Pathology Department at the University of Tennessee. Molly has taught me
much about acoustic analysis and voice timbre, and has good-naturedly
squelched all of my outrageous analogies between hearing and seeing. Sam
has been a constant support throughout.
This book has been a tremendous stretch for me and I would like to
thank Drs. David Brainard, Rhodri Cusack, David Field, Jeremy Marozeau,
and Mark Schmuckler for supplying data, and particularly Drs. Albert
Bregman, Peter Cariani, C. D. Geisler, and Paris Smaragdis for patiently
answering questions and improving the text. Hopefully they have pushed
the book back from the precipice of the Peter Principle. Finally, I would
like to thank the staff at the Jackson Laboratory. Doug McBeth and Ann
Jordan have processed my reference needs with unfailing good humor and
Jennifer Torrance and Sarah Williamson have patiently taught me the finer
points of figure preparation in a fraction of the time it would have taken me
to figure it out myself.