The study of how shapes are perceived and otherwise cognitively employed is among the most fascinating, and challenging, of any in cognitive psychology today. There is a sizable and impressive literature dealing with general questions of configurality, although these researches are fairly disparate and a firm definition of the construct is currently lacking. The proposed research is composed of a set of major, interlocked aims: 1. Apply theoretical, empirical, and methodological tools developed by the applicant and colleagues explicitly to the problem of configurality. 2. Synthesize two lines of the applicant's prior theoretical developments and construct new theory and methodology for application to configurality. 3. Generate tentative definitions based on historical and recent hypotheses concerning configurality within the confines of prior efforts and the synthesis described in (3). 4. Run a set of experiments using these nascent and provisional definitions and taxonomies for configurality. 5. Extend the theoretical work to explicitly consider the underlying dynamics and increasingly more sophisticated pattern spaces.
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