1 Auditory perceptual organization

1.1. The problem According to the functionalist view of perception and cognition (Brunswik 1955), perceptual information processing serves to support the organism in reaching its fundamental goals: avoiding dangers and gaining access to resources. Both dangers and resources are provided by objects in our environment. Thus a large part of perceptual processing can be understood as answering the question, ‘What is out there?’. However, even correctly answering this question is not sufficient for deciding on a course of action, because our possible interactions with the environment necessarily lie in the future compared to the time from which the information originated. Therefore, the second question to be answered is: ‘What will these objects do in the future?’; that is, our perceptual systems must describe the flow of events in the environment, and interpret them in terms of the behaviours of objects.