ABSTRACT
Humans spend most of their waking lives in complex visual environments that often consist of scores of individual objects. For example, a quick scan of the offi ce in which this chapter was written generates a count of at least 150 objects. How do people perceive and remember environments of such complexity? The growing fi eld of scene perception and memory is built upon a commitment to understanding how perception, attention, and memory operate under conditions of complexity and information oversaturation. For most of the history of vision research, experiments have been conducted using highly simplifi ed stimuli, often presented for very brief durations. Such approaches are necessary to isolate component operations of vision and memory (such as color perception or object recognition). However, relatively little work has been conducted to understand how component operations of vision and memory are coordinated to support real-world perception, memory, and behavior. The present chapter reviews work on this topic, most of which has been conducted in the last 10-15 years. Although this research area is still relatively young, signifi cant strides have been made, and it is now possible to provide a broad account of the means by which visual scene information is perceived and remembered.
