Visual search is the act of looking for a predefined target among other objects. This task has been widely used as an experimental paradigm to study visual attention, and because of its influence has also become a subject of research itself. When used as a paradigm, visual search studies address questions including the nature, function, and limits of preattentive processing and focused attentio...

Originally Published in Attention , H. Pashler (Ed.), London, UK: University College London Press, 1998. Acknowledgements: I thank Sara Bennett, Greg Gancarz, Todd Horowitz, and Patricia O'Neill for comments on earlier drafts of this paper. I am also grateful to Anne Treisman for various discussions and to Hal Pashler and an anonymous reviewed for excellent editorial comments.Some parts of this...

Certain visual stimuli evoke perceptions of discomfort in non-clinical populations. We investigated the impact of stimuli previously judged as uncomfortable by non-clinical populations on a visual search task. One stimulus that has been shown to affect discomfort judgments is noise that has been filtered to have particular statistical properties (Juricevic et al, 2010 Perception 39 884-899). A ...