Examining the current state of the research in perception stressing contributions in visual information processing, this volume provides an original and timely account of recent results obtained in this and other related areas of cognitive psychology. The scope of the book is intended to be broad, featuring state-of-the-art contributions from a number of outstanding researchers from different parts of the world -- the United States, Europe, and Australia. The intention is to update areas of considerable theoretical implications and active experimental investigation in this broad field called the "psychology of perception." This volume''s main purpose is to highlight, from a cognitive position, a selected number of important theoretical and empirical topics which deal with critical issues in perception and other high level, related cognitive processes such as attention, mental representation, memory, word naming and semantic categorization.

The studies reported were designed to answer many far-reaching questions including:

* Is the global precedence effect due to low or high level processing?

* Can veridical and illusory perception be explained by the same theory?

* What is the relationship between attention and perception?

* Is perception "direct" or an inferential process?

* What mechanisms are involved in picture and word naming and categorization?

* How can word and picture processing be modeled?

The answers to these questions seek to unite theoretical perspectives on very important areas of cognitive psychology such as attention, perception, representation of visual objects and words, and human memory.