(which I called streams) provide centers of description that connect sensory
features so that the right combinations can serve as the basis for recognizing
the environmental events. This was illustrated with three auditory phenomena,
the streaming effect, the decomposition of complex tones (the ABC experiment),
and perceptual closure through occluding sounds.
The explanation that I offered had two sides. It discussed both perceptual
representations and the properties of the acoustic input that were used heuris-
tically to do the segregation. I argued that one had to take the ecology of the
world of sound into account in looking for the methods that the auditory system
might be using, and claimed that this could serve as a powerful supplement
to the Gestalt theorist’s strategy of looking for formal similarities in the activity
of different senses. Finally I proposed that there were two kinds of constraints
on the formation of perceptual representations, unlearned primitive ones and
more sophisticated ones that existed in learned packages called schemas.
Notes
- For example, those described by Deutsch (1975a).
- From Guzman (1969).
- Bregman and Rudnicky (1975).
- Treisman and Schmidt (1982).
- Julesz and Hirsh (1972).
- Forms of this effect have been described by Vicario (1965, 1982) and Bregman and Achim (1973).
- See discussion in van Noorden (1975). A more elaborate form of Ko ̈rte’s law in audition has been
offered by Jones (1976). - Ogasawara (1936), Corbin (1942), and Attneave and Block (1973).
- Bregman and Mills (1982).
- See review in Warren (1982).
- Bregman and Pinker (1978).
- Cutting (1976).
- Anstis and Saida (1985).
- Shepard (1981).
- Demany (1982).
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The Auditory Scene 247