Causal contexts, cognitive cartoons and spatial sound

Abstract

Based on previous work the proposal here is that spatial perception problems in artificial environments (e.g. spatial music displays) can be cast as a subset of the problems of cognitive mapping of the causal context that surrounds and supports the perceiver. The intuitively available distinctions in these contexts of foreground and background, previously couched in terms of perceptual significance exist as externally valid causal distinctions; the task of perception is to cognitively represent these distinctions sufficiently for appropriate interaction. Effectively, this means that some items will “naturally” occupy attention, whilst others should equally naturally appeal to background, inattentive processes. Hence, aspects of the causal context will be accorded differing cognitive resources according to their significance, and some may be very sparsely represented in cartoon form. That is, perception engages in sophisticated information reduction in cognitive representation in order to capitalise on available resources. This poster outlines how causal contexts (including spatial matters) can be physically cartoonified in reciprocal manner to the dedicated perceptual mechanisms’ operations, to economically and intuitively appeal to perception.