“Chunking” the World through Multisensory Perception
This chapter argues that multisensory perceptions are learned, not the result of an automatic feature binding mechanism. For example, suppose you are at a live jazz show. The drummer begins a solo. You see the cymbal jolt and hear the clang. But you are also aware that the jolt and the clang are part of the same event. Psychologists have assumed that multisensory perceptions like this one are the result of an automatic feature binding mechanism. This chapter argues instead that when you experience the jolt and the clang as part of the same event, it is the result of a perceptual learning process. The jolt and the clang are best understood as a single learned perceptual unit, not as automatically bound. This chapter details the perceptual learning process of “unitization,” whereby we come to “chunk” the world into multisensory units, and argues that unitization best explains multisensory perception.