Sound recognition is more instantaneous and total than visual recognition

Evidence

The psychologists distinguish between auditory and visual forms of recognition, and the former being apparently more instantaneous and working by means of fully formed auditory or musical gestalts, while the latter is subject to an incremental exploration which may never crystallize into something appropriately “recognizable.” We recognize a tune all at once, in other words, while the flying saucers which ought to allow us to identify the generic class of a film clip may remain the object of some vague geometric gaze which never bothers to slot them into their obvious cultural and connotational position. In that case, it is clear how auditory logos would tend to dominate and rewrite visual ones, rather than the other way round (although one would have liked to imagine some reciprocal “estrangement” of the science fiction music by the photographs of mannequins, for example, in which the former is turned back into late twentiethcentury cultural junk of the same substance as these last). — Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic…, 239

Categorization

• QUESTION: A falsifiable empirical claim about perception psychology — worth checking whether this auditory-priority thesis actually holds in the cognitive science literature, or whether Jameson is borrowing a dated or loose version of it.
• XREF: connects to: Larger statistical changes produce faster and more certain auditory detection; Rapid pattern detection rests on memory for absolute pitch rather than relative pitch relationships; Acoustic increments are more salient than decrements in complex stimuli (+4 more)
• yield-rescued: below the book’s yield-target cutoff, included anyway for connecting to: Larger statistical changes produce faster and more certain auditory detection; Rapid pattern detection rests on memory for absolute pitch rather than relative pitch relationships; Acoustic increments are more salient than decrements in complex stimuli (+4 more)

Broader Connections

• Auditory scene analysis segregates sound first and forms percepts later #complicates (0.76) — Dijk, Pim van, Physiology, Psychoacoustics and…, 5137
• Perception of changing sound requires simultaneous time and frequency resolution #complicates (0.74)