In various cultures and at all spatial scales, humans produce a rich complexity of geometric
shapes such as lines, circles or spirals. Here, we propose that humans possess a language …

Mental representations are the essence of cognition. Yet to understand how the mind works,
one must understand not just the content of mental representations (ie, what information is …

With seemingly little effort, humans can both identify an object across large changes in
orientation and extend category membership to novel exemplars. Although researchers …

Data plots are widely used in science, journalism and politics, since they efficiently allow to
depict a large amount of information. Graphicacy, the ability to understand graphs, has thus …

Some things look more complex than others. For example, a crenulate and richly organized
leaf may seem more complex than a plain stone. What is the nature of this experience—and …

Although there is mounting evidence that input from the dorsal visual pathway is crucial for
object processes in the ventral pathway, the specific functional contributions of dorsal cortex …

Shape perception is crucial for object recognition. However, it remains unknown exactly how
shape information is represented and used by the visual system. Here, we tested the …

An ongoing philosophical discussion concerns how various types of mental states fall within
broad representational genera—for example, whether perceptual states are “iconic” or …

Despite the widespread use of graphs, little is known about how fast and how accurately we
can extract information from them. Through a series of four behavioral experiments, we …

Highlights•Relational representations play a key role in visual similarity computations.•
Qualitative representations are an important type of visual relation.•Structure-map** …