The current volume, a special issue of Visual Cognition, brings together an eclectic group of investigators, all of whom study critical issues in the perception of true real-world scenes. Topics include the rapid acquisition of scene gist; scene recognition; spatial layout and spatial scale; distance perception in scenes; updating of scene views over time; visual search for meaningful objects in scenes; scene context effects on object perception; scene representation in memory; the allocation of attention including eye fixations during scene viewing; and the neural implementation of these representations and processes in the brain. Because the study of real-world scene perception benefits from an interdisciplinary approach, contributors to the volume use a variety of research methods including psychophysical and behavioral techniques, eyetracking, functional neuroimaging (including fMRI and ERP), and mathematical and computational modeling. While much has been learned from studying simplified visual stimuli, many of the articles in this volume make the important point that understanding the functional and neural architectures of the visual system requires studying how that system operates when faced with the types of real-world stimuli that evolution crafted it to handle.

This volume was designed to identify the current limits of progress in the psychology of reading and language processing in an information processing framework. Leaders in their fields of interest, the chapter authors couple current theoretical analyses with new, formally presented experiments. The research -- cutting-edge and sometimes controversial -- reflects the prevailing analysis that language comprehension results in numerous levels of representation, including surface features, lexical properties, linguistic structures, and idea networks underlying a message as well as the situations to which a message refers. As a group, the chapters highlight the impact that input modality -- auditory or written -- has on comprehension. Finally, the studies also capture the evolution of new topic matter and ongoing debates concerning the competing paradigms, global proposals, and methods that form the foundation of the enterprise.
The book presents current accounts of research on word-, sentence-, and text-processing. It will prove informative for experimental psychologists as well as investigators in cognitive science disciplines such as computer science, linguistics, and educational psychology. The book will also be very helpful to graduate students who wish to develop expertise in the psychology of language processes. For them, it collects, in a single volume, readings that are representative of progress concerning many central problems in the field. As such, it is distinct from the numerous collected volumes that concentrate on a single issue. Complete author and subject indexes facilitate effective use of the volume.

This volume was designed to identify the current limits of progress in the psychology of reading and language processing in an information processing framework. Leaders in their fields of interest, the chapter authors couple current theoretical analyses with new, formally presented experiments. The research -- cutting-edge and sometimes controversial -- reflects the prevailing analysis that language comprehension results in numerous levels of representation, including surface features, lexical properties, linguistic structures, and idea networks underlying a message as well as the situations to which a message refers. As a group, the chapters highlight the impact that input modality -- auditory or written -- has on comprehension. Finally, the studies also capture the evolution of new topic matter and ongoing debates concerning the competing paradigms, global proposals, and methods that form the foundation of the enterprise. The book presents current accounts of research on word-, sentence-, and text-processing. It will prove informative for experimental psychologists as well as investigators in cognitive science disciplines such as computer science, linguistics, and educational psychology. The book will also be very helpful to graduate students who wish to develop expertise in the psychology of language processes. For them, it collects, in a single volume, readings that are representative of progress concerning many central problems in the field. As such, it is distinct from the numerous collected volumes that concentrate on a single issue. Complete author and subject indexes facilitate effective use of the volume.

The current volume, a special issue of Visual Cognition, brings together an eclectic group of investigators, all of whom study critical issues in the perception of true real-world scenes. Topics include the rapid acquisition of scene gist; scene recognition; spatial layout and spatial scale; distance perception in scenes; updating of scene views over time; visual search for meaningful objects in scenes; scene context effects on object perception; scene representation in memory; the allocation of attention including eye fixations during scene viewing; and the neural implementation of these representations and processes in the brain. Because the study of real-world scene perception benefits from an interdisciplinary approach, contributors to the volume use a variety of research methods including psychophysical and behavioral techniques, eyetracking, functional neuroimaging (including fMRI and ERP), and mathematical and computational modeling. While much has been learned from studying simplified visual stimuli, many of the articles in this volume make the important point that understanding the functional and neural architectures of the visual system requires studying how that system operates when faced with the types of real-world stimuli that evolution crafted it to handle.