We live in a rich, three dimensional world with complex arrangements of meaningful objects. For decades, however, theories of visual attention and perception have been based on findings generated from lines and color patches. While these theories have been indispensable for our field, the time has come to move on from this rather impoverished view of the world and (at least try to) get closer to the real thing. After all, our visual environment consists of objects that we not only look at, but constantly interact with. Having incorporated the meaning and structure of scenes, i.e. its “grammar”, then allows us to easily understand objects and scenes we have never encountered before. Studying this grammar provides us with the fascinating opportunity to gain new insights into the complex workings of attention, perception, and cognition. In this review, I will discuss how the meaning and the complex, yet predictive structure of real-world scenes influence attention allocation, search, and object identification.

我们生活在一个丰富的三维世界中，具有复杂的有意义的对象排列。然而，几十年来，视觉注意力和感知理论一直基于线条和色块产生的发现。虽然这些理论对我们的领域来说是不可或缺的，但现在是时候从这种相当贫乏的世界观中继续前进，并（至少尝试）更接近真实的事物。毕竟，我们的视觉环境由我们不仅观看而且不断与之交互的对象组成。结合了场景的含义和结构，即它的“语法”，我们就可以很容易地理解我们以前从未遇到过的物体和场景。学习这种语法为我们提供了一个迷人的机会，让我们对注意力、感知和认知的复杂运作有了新的认识。