Spatial Vision, Vol. 18, No. 4, pp. 375–377 (2005)  VSP 2005. Also available online - www.vsppub.com Preface Visual perception and encoding KEITH LANGLEY Department of Psychology, University College London, London, WC1E 6BT, UK The Applied Vision Association (AVA) is again grateful to the Academic Journal Spatial Vision for the publication of a third special issue. The papers were presented at the Annual General Meeting (AGM) of the AVA which was held for the first time in Bristol on the 31st March 2004. The timing of this AGM also coincided with significant changes for the AVA. As a result of the retirement of the Secretariat Nick de Brunner, and following an impressive bid by Prof. Tom Troscianko, the base of the AVA moved from the College of Optometrists in London to the Department of Psychology in Bristol. The AVA would like to thank Nick De Brunner for his input over the last fifteen years and wish him well in his retirement. Extended thanks are also owed to Theresa Murtagh who ‘ran the show’ in the capacity of secretary for the AVA. The AVA would also like to thank Dr. Mark Scase for his extended office as chairman of the AVA and a hearty welcome to Prof. M. Georgeson as the new chairman. The topic of discussion for the AGM was Visual Perception and Encoding — a broad topic that was chosen to attract a variety of presentations. The focal point of the AVA annual meeting is the Geoffrey J. Burton memorial lecture which was given by Dr. Anya Hurlbert from the University of Newcastle. The title for the talk was ‘How our brain encodes colours of real objects’. A significant portion of Dr. Hulbert’s lecture discussed our perception of reddish hues from a cross-cultural perspective, and also from the point of view of individual gender differences. Dr. Hurlbert put forward the intriguing possibility that the preference for the colour pink by females could be based on an observation that male faces are on average somewhat redder than female faces. The lecture was well received by attendees of the conference. The conference was comprised of twelve paper presentations and six poster presentations. The special issue produced as a result of the meeting consists of a selection of those paper presentations and the abstracts. From those papers, special attention is drawn to the paper authored by Hibbard and Bouzit (2005) and the encoding of disparity. In the paper, the authors suggest that our perception of depth from disparity cues is influenced by the disparity distributions that one might expect to occur from natural scenes. The idea that we might predict perceptual