This chapter was a journey through the realm of object recognition, the all-important ability to know what it is that we're looking at. This ability is the basis for using, and/or reacting appropriately to, objects encountered in the visual environment. As you learned, recognition has to overcome a number of challenges, including occlusion and variation in viewpoint. Among the ways that vision deals with these challenges is neural plasticity: with practice and experience, the nervous system adjusts its sensitivity to conform to the demands of visual inputs. You also learned that the temporal pathway, and particularly its inferotemporal (IT) cortex, is a major contributor to object recognition. Along the way, you were introduced to imagery and memory, which play important supporting roles in object recognition. You learned that imagery and vision seem to depend on some common regions in the brain. Theories of recognition were tested for their ability to account for important aspects of face and "greeble" recognition. As we noted, much of our understanding of recognition comes from studying failures in recognition that are specifically linked to brain damage (as in prosopagnosia) or from diminished visual input. You learned also that memory for what you've just seen is far more fallible than you might imagine. Finally, we applied some basic information about vision and visual recognition to the challenges of reading printed text.

This chapter and the previous ones intentionally ignored several important aspects of vision-color, motion and depth perception. Now that you're familiar with the fundamentals of vision and object recognition, you will learn how we deal with a world of color, movement and objects arranged at varying distances in the next three chapters. And you will also see that these aspects of vision can also contribute to the detection of object boundaries and, hence, the recognition of objects.