The current scene

This chapter provides a brief background of the book, the collective contributions of modern pioneers of visual cognition. The book covers topics from spatial vision to the study of context, from rapid perception to emotion, from attention to memory, from psychology to computational neuroscience, and from single neurons to the human brain. The rest of the chapter provides a snapshot of visual recognition and the visual world, citing examples on scene understanding and the challenges in spatial vision. It points out that people store scene memories and their regularities in memory structures that are enhanced and fine-tuned with experience. It also notes that the brain combines different scene views across eye movements to fully understand and perceive the surroundings.