<P>For many years, researchers have studied visual recognition with objects -- single,clean, clear, and isolated objects, presented to subjects at the center of the screen. In our realenvironment, however, objects do not appear so neatly. Our visual world is a stimulating scenerymess; fragments, colors, occlusions, motions, eye movements, context, and distraction all affectperception. In this volume, pioneering researchers address the visual cognition of scenes fromneuroimaging, psychology, modeling, electrophysiology, and computer vision perspectives.</P><P>Building on past research -- and accepting the challenge of applying what we havelearned from the study of object recognition to the visual cognition of scenes -- these leadingscholars consider issues of spatial vision, context, rapid perception, emotion, attention, memory,and the neural mechanisms underlying scene representation. Taken together, their contributions offera snapshot of our current knowledge of how we understand scenes and the visual world aroundus.</P><P><B>Contributors</B>Elissa M. Aminoff, Moshe Bar, Margaret Bradley,Daniel I. Brooks, Marvin M. Chun, Ritendra Datta, Russell A. Epstein, Michèle Fabre-Thorpe, ElenaFedorovskaya, Jack L. Gallant, Helene Intraub, Dhiraj Joshi, Kestutis Kveraga, Peter J. Lang, Jia LiXin Lu, Jiebo Luo, Quang-Tuan Luong, George L. Malcolm, Shahin Nasr, Soojin Park, Mary C. Potter,Reza Rajimehr, Dean Sabatinelli, Philippe G. Schyns, David L. Sheinberg, Heida Maria Sigurdardottir,Dustin Stansbury, Simon Thorpe, Roger Tootell, James Z. Wang</P>