Perceptual Coherence : Hearing and Seeing

Preface
The purpose of this book is to describe and explain some of the similarities
and differences between hearing and seeing. It is written as an intermediatelevel
text. It is not mathematical, although it depends on mathematical and
analytical thinking. I have tried to walk a line between an overly simplified
and an over-the-top presentation of the material.
I think of this text as a “bridge” book in two ways.
The first bridge is between hearing and seeing. It used to be that individuals
who studied hearing and seeing thought of themselves as studying perception.
Perceiving, with only rare exceptions, involves making inferences
and decisions based on information coming from several modalities simultaneously.
The choice of using auditory, visual, or tactile input (or combinations)
would be based on the particular problem studied. Audition and
vision would be model systems, to be employed according to the research
question. Currently, the technical expertise required to do research with either
sense, and the enormous amount of information about both, have led to
a distinct intellectual fissure, with separate journals and professional meetings.
The research literature often makes passing references to similar outcomes
in other senses, but there is little follow-up.
On top of these experimental issues, I think there is a general belief that
hearing and seeing are fundamentally different. I have enumerated many of
these differences in table 1.1. Nonetheless, I have always thought that beneath
these differences are fundamental similarities in the ways that all
modalities make sense of the external world. All events and objects (and
perceivers) exist in a common space and time, and all events and objects
have a sensory structure that can be picked up by the perceiver. Taken together,
I believe that this implies that the internal structures for hearing and
seeing are at least qualitatively the same.