The primary purpose of this workshop is to create a broad research summary and planning report on the topic of visual cognition to guide research in the interdisciplinary field. Visual cognition integrates visual perception with higher level domain knowledge, and serves as the interface to high-level reasoning, planning, communication, learning, and other cognitive abilities. Many diverse, practical areas, such as automated manufacturing and robotics, mechanical design, transportation planning, education, and the representation and storage of spatial information stand to benefit from research in visual cognition. A fuller understanding of higher-level cognitive processes and their development may hinge on an understanding of their relation to perception. There is already a body of relevant work in computer science on these issues, categorized variously as diagrammatic reasoning, qualitative physical reasoning, geometric reasoning, and the formal logic of spatial reasoning, and there have been other meetings on visual cognition. But the field is of necessity strongly interdisciplinary (the three workshop organizers come from psychology, computer science, and electrical engineering, for example), so this meeting will attempt to be more comprehensive and integrative in nature, in order to accomplish its stated purpose.
