Attention is a central, organizing function in perception, cognition, and action, controlling the selection of sensory information and mediating responses to achieve our behavioural aims. In everyday life, core functions of attention are expressed in visual search behaviour, when humans scan their environments for task-relevant visual information. Not surprisingly then, visual search paradigms have been at the core of attention research. Work in the past decades has returned to a number of (by now) “classical” issues, such as attentional capture and template-based search guidance, as well as opening up new issues, such as statistical (long-term) learning in search guidance, and control over visual working memory. In parallel with this, there has been a marked convergence of the methodologies for addressing these issues, with many studies combining standard behavioural approaches with electro- and neurophysiological recordings, functional brain imaging, lesion studies, and computational modelling.
The purpose of this Visual Cognition Special Issue is to present a selective overview of the main lines of current research on the functions and underlying mechanisms of attention in visual search, with a focus on visual selection. Specifically, the Special Issue presents a set of papers concerned with four issues: (1) Template-based search guidance and attentional capture; (2) Search guidance by statistical long-term learning; (3) Brain mechanisms of visual search; (4) New data and models of visual search.
The papers are based on the fourth “Visual Search and Selective Attention” symposium (VSSA4) held at Holzhausen/Ammersee, near Munich, Germany, 13–16 July 2018. The symposium was attended by leading experts on the above issues, from a variety of disciplines, including experimental and neuropsychology, electro- and neurophysiology, functional imaging, and computational modelling. The aim was to bring together such a diverse group and approaches in order to take stock and to foster interdisciplinary dialogue, to identify important shared questions in the study of visual search and selective attention and discuss ways of how these can be resolved using both existing and new methodologies. The meeting was supported by the German Research Foundation (“Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft – DFG”) as part of the DFG research group “FOR 2293” (University of Munich, Germany; coordinator: H. J. Müller) and the Munich Center for Neurosciences – Brain & Mind (MCNLMU). We thank all the contributors for an exciting collection of research papers.
We would like to end with a haiku sequence by S. Pierides, who marvellously captured the symposium proceedings, both inside and outside the seminar room ().
Figure 1. Haiku sequence by S. Pierides (with permission).
