Perceptual Organization and Lawful Specification

Abstract

When a listener can also see a talker, audible and visible properties are ineluctably combined, perceptually. This perceptual disposition to audiovisual integration has received widely ranging explanations. At one extreme, accounts have likened perception to a blind listener and a deaf viewer combined within a single skin, resolving discrepancies in identification by each modality. At the other extreme, perception has been described as necessarily and automatically synesthetic. Useful descriptive and explanatory evidence was provided in a study of auditory-haptic presentation by Fowler and Dekle (1991), showing that neither familiarity nor congruence is required for perceptual integration to occur across modalities. Instead, the notion of conjoint lawful specification was proposed as a governing constraint. This principle treats sensory activity as proximal sampling of the properties of distal objects and events, and this essay notes that its corollaries offer a broadly applicable guide in contemporary investigations of perception.