This book describes the conceptual similarities and differences between auditory and visual perception. The incoming energy is a single world containing objects, events, and various sources of light and acoustic energy. The energy is neutral; it does not specify the objects itself, so the sensory systems must abstract the information from the correlated sensory energy that does specify objects and differentiate that energy from the uncorrelated sensory noise energy. The first three chapters in this book are introductory. They describe properties of the auditory and visual worlds, how the hiera ... More

This book describes the conceptual similarities and differences between auditory and visual perception. The incoming energy is a single world containing objects, events, and various sources of light and acoustic energy. The energy is neutral; it does not specify the objects itself, so the sensory systems must abstract the information from the correlated sensory energy that does specify objects and differentiate that energy from the uncorrelated sensory noise energy. The first three chapters in this book are introductory. They describe properties of the auditory and visual worlds, how the hierarchical organization of the auditory and visual systems transform the local processing due to receptive fields into global percepts. In addition, these chapters discuss whether those receptive fields are designed to maximize information transmission and whether notions of sparse coding can explain the auditory and visual neural encoding. Each of the six remaining chapters considers one kind of perceiving: auditory and visual textures; detection of first- and second-order motion; gaining control, contrast, and internal and external noise; color perception; timbre perception; and auditory and visual object segmentation. Given that the perceptual goals and perceptual variables for hearing and seeing are equivalent, namely to build a coherent perceptual world, the rules and heuristics will be the same for both senses.