Page 234 - Foundations of Cognitive Psychology : Core Readings

The Auditory Scene 239

The same thing happens in audition. If we look at any one-tenth-second slice
of figure 9.4, the information shown in that slice represents a composition of
influences. The spectrum may have been shaped by voices and by other simul-
taneous sounds. Somehow, if we are able to understand the events that have
shaped it, we are succeeding, as in sentence comprehension, in developing a
mental description that displays the simple causative factors and their inter-
relationships in an explicit way.
There is a provocative similarity among the three examples—the syntactical,
the visual, and the auditory. In all three cases, the perceivers are faced with a
complex shaping of the sensory input by the effects of various simple features,
and they must recover those features from their effects. Transposing the lin-
guist’s vocabulary to the field of perception, one might say that the job of the
perceiver is to parse the sensory input and arrive at its deep structure. In some
sense the perceiver has to build up a description of the regularities in the world
that have shaped the evidence of our senses. Such regularities would include
the fact that there are solid objects with their own shapes and colors (in vision)
and sounds with their own timbres and pitches (in audition).
Although theapproachofthischapter is notphysiological,itisimportant
to see its relation to physiological explanation. We can take as an example the
physiological explanations that have been offered for the streaming effect of
figure 9.8. It has been proposed that the segregation into two streams occurs
because a neural mechanism responsible for tracking changes in pitch has tem-
porarily become less effective. 13 This interpretation is supported by the results
of experiments that show that the segregation becomes stronger with longer
repetitions of the cycle of tones. Presumably the detector for change has be-
come habituated in the same manner as other feature detectors are thought to.
This view of the stream segregation phenomenon sees it as a breakdown. This
seems to be in serious conflict with the scene-analysis view presented earlier, in
which stream segregation was seen as an accomplishment. So which is it to be,
breakdown or accomplishment?
We do not know whether or not this physiological explanation is correct. But
even if it is, its truth may not affect the scene analysis explanation of streaming.
To demonstrate why, it is necessary to again appeal to an argument based on
evolution. Every physiological mechanism that develops must stand the test of
the winnowing process imposed by natural selection. However, the survival of
an individual mechanism will often depend not just on what it does in isola-
tion, but on the success of the larger functional system of which it forms a part.
Because of the indirect way in which the individual physiological mechanism
contributes to the successful accomplishments displayed by the larger sys-
tem, it is possible that what looks like a breakdown when seen at the single-
mechanism level is actually contributing to an accomplishment at the system
level. To take a homespun example, consider the case of a pitfall trap. When
the top of the trap, covered with branches and leaves, ‘‘breaks down’’ and the
animal falls through into the hole, we can see that the physical breakdown (of
the trap cover) represents a functional success (of the entrapment). The break-
down and the achievement are at different levels of abstraction. By analogy, it
would not be contradictory to assert that the streaming effect represented both