ABSTRACT
Abstract
The world has regularities at different scales of space and time. These interact to give us observable phenomena (encodedness). Epistemic mechanisms integrate across receptive mechanisms and cues, and the resulting perceptual descriptions represent the world regularities, not the sensory evidence. The transformation from evidence to description generally does not map local regions of stimulation onto underlying descriptions in a one-to-one fashion. A single piece of sensory evidence must be allowed to support more than one world regularity as long as the constructed descriptions are not contradictory (duplex perception); however, contradictions will be avoided (categorical perception). If a particular description uses up a piece of the evidence, it will be useful to form a remainder that can be used to support the descriptions of other regularities, either of the same or other types (pre-emptiveness). Human speech perception is subject to these principles, as is nonspeech auditory perception, visual perception, space perception, and the understanding of human nonspeech movements and social intentions.
