Page 233 - Foundations of Cognitive Psychology : Core Readings

238 Albert S. Bregman

butifthere aremanyofthem, competingwithorreinforcing oneanother,the
right description of the input should generally emerge. If they all vote in the
same way, the resulting percept is stable and unambiguous. When they are
faced with artificial signals, set up in the laboratory, in which one heuristic is
made to vote for integration and another for segregation, the resulting experi-
ences can be unstable and ambiguous.
My use of the word ‘‘heuristic’’ does not imply a computer-like procedure
that involves a long sequence of steps, extended over time. We have to bear in
mind that the decisions of the auditory system are carried out in very short
periods of time. I use the word heuristic in its functional sense only, as a pro-
cess that contributes to the solution of a problem.
Whereas the perceptual phenomena that we examined earlier are the prov-
ince of psychologists, the problem of how people build mental descriptions is a
topic that has been looked at by linguists too. As a result, they have provided
us with a metaphor for understanding auditory scene analysis. This metaphor,
‘‘deep structure,’’ derives from the study of the syntactic structure of sentences.
One of the basic problems in syntax is how to describe the rules that allow
the speaker to impose a meaning on a sentence by adding, subtracting, or
rearranging elements in the sentence. For example, in English one of these rules
imposes the form of a question on a sentence by placing the auxiliary verb at
the beginning of the sentence. Thus, the active sentence ‘‘He has gone there’’ is
expressed in a question as ‘‘Has he gone there?’’ The difficulty that occurs when
a language loads a sentence with meanings is that when a large number of
form-shaping rules are piled on top of one another, it becomes difficult to un-
tangle them and to appreciate the contribution of each of them to the final
product. Somehow all speakers of English come to be able to do this, but the
learning takes some time. In the 1960s, Noam Chomsky introduced the notion
of the ‘‘deep structure’’ of a sentence, a description of a sentence that separately
and explicitly described all the underlying syntactic forms and displayed their
interrelationships. When a theorist, or a listener, starts with a given sentence
and builds a description of its syntax, this is called ‘‘parsing’’ the sentence. It
was argued by psychologists who were inspired by Chomsky’s approach that
in thecourseofunderstanding asentence, thehearerparsesasentence and
builds a deep structure for it.
We can talk about perception in a very similar way. Just as a spoken sentence
imposes an extraordinary decoding problem upon the listener, so does a non-
linguistic sensory input. Whenever we experience an event, the sensory im-
pression is always the result of an elaborate composition of physical influences.
If we look at a four-inch-square area of a table top, for example, the local
properties of this area have been affected by many factors: the table’s shininess,
the variations in its surface color, the unevenness of its surface, the shadow of a
nearby object, the color of the light source, the slant of the surface of the table
relative to our eyes, and perhaps many more. These factors are all simulta-
neously shaping the sensory information; they are not simply inserted side by
side. The shininess is not at one place in our visual image, the surface color
at another, and so on. Neither can they be extracted from the sense data inde-
pendently of one another.