ABSTRACT
Although Gibson’s theoretical statements about optical information cannot applied to other senses without modification it can be concluded that his proposition of an ambient array and its implications is appropriate for the auditory domain. The kind of wave train produced by a mechanical event is specific to that particular event. The correspondence of sound waves to their sources means that information about an object or event is physically present in the ambient acoustics. The perceiving animal’s task is to detect invariants that are specific to the environmental properties, so as to be able to identify sound producing events. Despite these ecological insights the ecological approach has rarely been used to study actual auditory events (see, however, Warren and Verbrugge, 1984, for an example). To continue this kind of event research we asked whether subjects can tell the number of balls falling on a surface by relying on auditory information.
