Abstract: With the development of technology and integration of photogrammetry,remote sensing and GIS going further,a new branch of information science,that is,the geoinformatics was risen and have been developed rapidly.As a spatial information science,it concerns not only with the earth science,information science,computer science,artificial intelligence,expert system etc.,but also with the cognition science.Among them,the cognition science is the theoretical basis for the information acquisition,processing,storing,representation,distribution and using.Based on the basic theory of visual cognition mechanism and cognitive psychology,a brief introduction about the visual object recognition model is presented in this paper.Three pattern recognition models,which are template-based matching model,prototype-based matching model and feature-based matching model,are built and discussed separately.In addition,the influence of object background and visual focusing point to the result of pattern recognition is also presented.Then,it is pointed out that we should pay more attention to the research on basic visual cognition theory.Cognitive psychology has the theoretical guiding function for the actual pattern recognition processing procedure.