"Buster Mudd" wrote:

Because "hearing" is a cognitive process; it takes place in the brain,
not in the ear. So if your brain tells you you didn't hear it, even if
soundwaves did strike your eardrum...and even (!) if at an earlier time
your brain told you that you did hear it...for all intents & purposes,
you didn't hear it. Saying "I heard it" is only useful if you can
access the perception in order to make subsequent discriminations.

I agree with the basic idea that perception is something that
influences behavior, but why does the behavior have to be restricted
to comparison and identification? Suppose a listener gives higher
approval ratings to one set of (blind) stimuli than another, without
ever trying to say which stimuli were the same and which were
different. This would be an influence on behavior, but of a weaker
sort than is required by the "can you reliably identify" type of test.


There are cases all the time when people perceive
things and then forget them.

At which point any information they may have gleaned from perceiving
that thing is lost to them. Hence, the distinction between whether they
actually perceived it & then forgot it, or never perceived it in the
first place, is moot.

Not if the information is still doing work somewhere in your cognitive
economy, even though it can't be brought to consciousness, or is not
specific enough to enable one to perform the identification task.

Mark