GUEST EDITORIAL - PERCEPTUAL ORGANIZATION AND OBJECT RECOGNITION - POOR IS THE ACRONYM, RICH THE NOTION

Instead of studying perceptual organisation and object recognition in relative isolation, they can be viewed as two highly related sets of p rocesses performed by the visual system to achieve its goal of acquiri ng information about the world. Fifteen papers devoted to specific sub problems within this active area of research have been brought togethe r in two successive issues of Perception. Collectively they demonstrat e that focusing on the functional interrelationships between perceptua l organisation and object recognition will enrich our understanding of each of the subprocesses involved. The editorial provides an overview of the papers together with a discussion on how they relate to one an other. If a general message is to be extracted from this set of papers , it is that the reported findings and the speculations offered to exp lain them suggest that the visual system's processes cannot be charact erised in general by simple dichotomies such as analytic versus wholis tic, bottom-up versus top-down, local versus global, low-level versus high-level, parallel versus serial, etc. Instead, it appears that a wi de variety of mechanisms is available to the visual system. Therefore, a complete understanding of its functioning will require careful exam ination of the circumstances within which one processing mechanism see ms to be selected over another, depending on the available information , the task demands, and perhaps even the observer's individual charact eristics.