Submission of manuscripts. Contributions should be sent by email, preferably in PDF format, to one of the editors familiar with the subject, or to the administrative manager (note: if the paper is accepted for publication, a Word or RTF format file will be required by the publishers). All figures should be merged in the document and should be of low resolution (note: higher-resolution figures will be required once the paper is accepted, see figures and illustrations). Submission of a paper implies acceptance of the following four conditions: (1) the paper reports unpublished work; (2) the manuscript is not being concurrently submitted to any other publication and not being made available in electronic form; (3) the authors are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.
Style. The language of the journal is English. Authors are urged to write as clearly as possible, 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. Displays and controls should be fully described and may be illustrated. Statistical tests need not be given in full but papers concerned with mathematical, logical, and programming issues should be written up fully. Abbreviations should be used sparingly. Merriam-Webster's Collegiate Dictionary is recommended as the spelling reference.
Presentation. Manuscripts should be typed in double spacing, preferably in A4 format (21 cm×30 cm), with a wide margin (4 cm) and the pages should be numbered. Alterations in the text may present problems once the paper is set for printing and authors are requested to check their typescripts most carefully before submission. 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).
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.
Figures and illustrations. On initial submission, figures should be of low resolution and merged in the manuscript document. If a paper is accepted we will require figures in high-resolution TIFF format (at least 300dpi resolution for greyscale TIFFs, and at least 600dpi resolution for black and white TIFFs) or in EPS format. PDFs are also accepted, but authors should take care to check that the figures match the hard copies. Other formats are not accepted (JPEG, GIF, BMP, Powerpoint, Excel, etc). Figures should be numbered consecutively throughout the paper. Figure captions should be listed on a separate sheet. Tables should be numbered and typed on separate sheets. The approximate position of the figures and tables in the text should be indicated. Small copies or prints of all the figures should be provided for the use of referees.
Website. Authors should note that the journal encourages submission to the Perception website of additional material relevant to published articles. This might include, for example, colour illustrations which are expensive to print in the journal, or which require precise differences of colour in adjacent regions which could be specified by software to allow reproduction on the displays of individual machines. Authors may submit stimuli, such as sets of faces, which have been used in published studies, and may be of use to other experimenters. Also welcome are stimulus materials which require a dynamic medium, and so are impossible to reproduce on the printed page. Prospective contributors should contact the webmaster before submitting material for inclusion on the site.
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, which will be supplied to them on request.
Submission of ‘Last But Not Least’ manuscripts.
‘Last but not Least’ is a section of Perception in which the conventional rules of publication are relaxed. This section 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. Manuscripts are limited to a length of 1500 words (including abstract, references, and figure captions, but excluding the title page and acknowledgements) and abstracts are limited to 150 words and should not include references. Papers and abstracts shorter than this are strongly encouraged. To encourage brevity and informality, there should be no section headings apart from the abstract.
In the first instance, research papers should be submitted to the administrative manager in electronic form, with figures and figure captions embedded within the text. If required, other materials that are to appear only on the website (for example, colour images and movies) should be sent as separate files. The title page should include (i) contact details for the authors, (ii) a word count for the entire article, and (iii) a word count for the abstract. 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.
The journal aims to publish one ‘Last But Not Least’ paper per issue.