Abstract
The psychological mechanisms involved in the process by which one identifies and names a particular pattern from a whole class of patterns, such as a letter of the alphabet, face or a voice, is discussed. Taking as its main experimental paradigm the classification of multi-dimensional stimuli, the book considers the contribution of information theory to pattern perception, the part played by parallel and serial processing in recognition, the identification of patterns by computers, initial coding theories and the synthesis of whole patterns from their separate parts.