View article

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 electroand …