In a fraction of a second-from a single visual fixation-humans are able to comprehend novel images of objects and scenes, often under highly degraded and novel viewing conditions. Recent research on how the brain achieves this remarkable feat suggests that objects are represented as an arrangement of simple viewpoint-invariant shape primitives, termed “geons,” that serve to distinguish visual classes, so that a given image can be determined, for example, to be that of a chair, fork, or penguin. As long as two or three geons in their specified relations can be extracted from the image, entry-level classification will almost always be successful despite drastic variations in the object's silhouette and its local context. Progress on neural and neural network modeling of these capacities and their relation to face recognition are discussed.