Welcome to the web site of the 2nd installment of the international symposium on

Visual Search and Selective Attention (VSSA08)!

The symposium will be held at a scenic lakeside (“Murtensee”) location near Fribourg, Switzerland, in July 2008 (July 16th-19th, 2008) (see Venue for further details). The meeting is organized by Joseph Krummenacher (Fribourg) and Hermann J. Müller (Munich), and supported by the Swiss National Science Foundation (SNSF) and the German Research Foundation (Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft, DFG). The scientific committee includes Jeremy M. Wolfe (Boston, USA), Glyn W. Humphreys (Birmingham, UK), Hermann J. Müller, and Joseph Krummenacher. 

The symposium is divided into four thematic sessions, each opened by a keynote speaker and addressing a set of controversial issues in visual search:

Bottom-up and Top-down Control of Attention
    Martin Eimer (Birkbeck College, University of London)
Dynamics of attention across time and space
    Chris N. L. Olivers (Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam)
Brain mechanisms
    Glyn W. Humphreys (University of Birmingham)
Modeling visual search
    Jeremy M. Wolfe (Harvard Medical School, Boston and Brigham and Women’s Hospital)

Some 35 leading experts, from a variety of disciplines (experimental psychology, neuropsychology, electro- and neurophysiology, computational modeling), have been invited to contribute papers to the various themes (see Participants and Program for further details).

The purpose of the meeting is to foster an interdisciplinary dialogue in order to identify important shared issues and discuss ways of how these can be resolved using convergent methodologies.

The meeting is concluded by a symposium lecture delivered by Howard Egeth (Johns Hopkins University).