I read a fantastic paper on visual perception. A must read for everyone designing visual systems. The paper is called Perception in Visualization, written by Christopher G. Healey. The paper is very very practical. It presents the theory behind perception very well and always gives examples. Some of the topics covered are:
- preattentive perception
- Feature Integration Theory
- Texton Theory
- Similarity Theory
- Postattentive Vision
- Change Blindness
Again, a very well written and very educational paper!