Studying Visual Attention with the Visual Search Paradigm

Visual search is one of the most prominent experimental
paradigms for the investigation of visual attention. Many
different theories of visual attention have been proposed.
They have been motivated and/or tested by visual search
experiments. In the present talk, I outline two "classical"
theories of visual attention, namely the Feature Integration 
Theory and the Guided Search Theory. It is explained how
teh analysis of eye movements in visual search studies 
supports the Guided Search Theory. Finally I present my
Area Activation Model that is related to Guided Search, but
is able to quantitatively predict saccadic selectivity in
visual search tasks.