Submission. Authors must submit via PiMMS (the Pion Manuscript Management System). Submission of a paper implies acceptance of the following four conditions: (1) the paper reports original unpublished work; (2) the manuscript is not being concurrently submitted to any other publication and not being made available in electronic form; (3) the authors are fully authorised to submit the material for publication; and (4) if accepted, the paper will not be republished in printed or electronic form without the consent of the publishers.
Prospective manuscripts should be submitted via PiMMS (the Pion Manuscript Management System) in the file types described below. During the submission process either Regular paper, Report, or Short and Sweet should be selected as the paper type. The word counts of the abstract and the full length must be stated in the Confidential Information section of the submission. Papers exceeding the limits described above will be returned to the authors without review. Before being sent out for review, the section editor first assesses the general suitability of papers for publication in this section.
Paper type Papers may be submitted as Regular papers, Reports, or Short and Sweet papers (formerly, Last but not Least).
Regular papers. These form the bulk of the content in both journals. They are open submissions on any aspect of perception involving any one or more sensory modalities. Sections should usually include (in order): a title page giving full details of all authors and their affiliations, abstract, introduction, methods, results (and discussion), and (general) discussion. The abstract is limited to 200 words. There are no other limits, though authors are encouraged to aim for brevity and to write in a style that will be accessible to readers without expertise in the immediate subject area of the article.
Reports. This section will follow the established pattern (for example, those published in Nature Neuroscience and Current Biology), where reports are to-the-point, aimed at a broad readership, and the methods section is placed at the end of the communication. These papers are limited to 5 pages (equivalent to about 5 ½ pages in the
Short and Sweet. For this section, the conventional rules of publication are relaxed. Papers should report material that will appeal to sensory scientists, but for which detailed experiments, complex analysis, and well-worked computational models should not have been performed. The work should be easy to describe, have theoretical relevance, and appeal to a broad readership. The point(s) should not require much data or analysis, though the methodological details that are important for interpretation should be clear where appropriate (these details can be placed in figure legends if desired). The work might also be written to amuse. The word limit is 1200 words, including the abstract (up to 150 words), figure captions, and references, but excluding acknowledgements. To encourage brevity and informality, there should be no section headings apart from the abstract. These papers will usually be sent to just a single reviewer. Occasionally, a second reviewer might be used at the editor’s discretion. The journal aims to publish one Short and Sweet paper per issue.
Electronic files.
Authors must upload the following electronic files:
If the manuscript is accepted, a separate high-resolution graphic file of each figure in the paper will also be required (*.eps, *.tif, and *.pdf formats only will be accepted), but separate high-resolution figures should not be submitted prior to acceptance.
In addition,
Figures and illustrations. Though low resolution figures should be used in the original submission, the final individual figures should have at least 300dpi resolution for greyscale or colour TIFFs, and at least 600dpi resolution for black and white TIFFs. Colour printing must be paid by authors and, if a paper contains colour, this should be indicated in the Confidential Information section of the submission form; if the paper is accepted, authors will be contacted in due course with an estimate of costs. It is possible to have colour in the electronic version of the paper free of charge (the paper copy will be in black and white). However, the black-and-white copy must then be intelligible independent of the colour—for example, different shades of grey could be used to indicate different lines in a graph. Colour images are welcome as "additional material" (see below).
Style. Authors are urged to write as clearly as possible, in English (either UK or US usage is acceptable), with emphasis on what they judge to be of greatest importance and interest, with, where possible, clearly stated theoretical implications. Experimental results should be presented in sufficient detail for replication to be possible. Statistical tests need not be given in full. Abbreviations should be used sparingly. Merriam–Webster's Collegiate Dictionary is recommended as the spelling reference.
Presentation. Great care should be taken in differentiating between capital and lowercase characters (s and S, c and C, p and P, etc), Latin and Greek characters (k and kappa, p and rho, w and omega, etc), and letters and numerals (l and 1, z and 2, etc).
Abstract. All papers should be preceded by a brief abstract (of about 200 words for regular articles, and no more than 150 words for Short and Sweet articles).
Nomenclature. It is recommended that the authors follow the Royal Society's latest publication `Quantities, Units, and Symbols' and use the SI system of units.
Website. We encourage the submission of additional material relevant to the submitted manuscript, to be hosted on the Perception website—for example, the stimuli used in the published study, or material which cannot be represented in print, such as animations or colour images (see above).
References. References in the text should give the surname of the author and the year of publication in parentheses, for example Attneave (1935) or (Attneave 1935) followed by a, b, ... when two or more references to work by the same author(s) are given for the same year. At the end of the text the references should be listed in alphabetical order of authors' names and in chronological order for each author. Titles of papers and the names of periodicals should be given in full, with initial and final page numbers. The publisher and town of publication should be given for books. Examples of reference citation are given below:
Carpenter R H S, 1988 Movement of the Eyes 2nd edition (London: Pion)
Morgan M J, 1991 "Hyperacuity", in Spatial Vision Ed. D M Regan (London: Macmillan) pp 87 - 113
Nascimento S M C, 1995 Surface Colour Perception under Illuminant Transformations PhD thesis, Keele University, Keele, UK
The Highway Code 1974 (London: HMSO)
Watanabe T, Cavanagh P, 1996 "Texture laciness: the texture equivalent of transparency" Perception 25 293 - 303
Wenderoth P (forthcoming) "The effects of the contrast polarity of dot pair partners on the detection of bilateral symmetry"
Proofs and reprints. The proofs should be returned without delay and alterations kept to a minimum. Authors will receive permission to distribute a limited number of electronic copies (PDFs), which will be supplied to them on request.
Meeting the requirements of grant-awarding bodies.
In some cases, grant-awarding bodies set certain publication requirements—for instance, requiring funded research to be made publicly available in an unrestricted format within a certain time period. We are almost always able to satisfy the requirements of funding bodies, and invite authors to contact us if they have any concerns in this regard.
Ethics of experiments.
When describing experiments using humans, the author(s) should include a statement in the paper confirming that those experiments were carried out in accordance with the relevant institutional and national regulations and legislation and with the World Medical Association Helsinki Declaration as revised in October 2008 (http://www.wma.net/en/30publications/10policies/b3/index.html). Where animals were used a similar declaration of conformity with the relevant institutional and national regulations and legislation should be included.