Research Meeting: Visual Search and Selective Attention

Just returned from a really great meeting at the scenic lakeside (“Ammersee”) location near Munich, Germany. The third Visual Search and Selective Attention symposium was hosted and organised by Hermann Müller and Thomas Geyer (Munich), and supported by the Munich Center for Neurosciences (MCN) and the German Science Foundation (DFG). The stated aim of the meeting was:

"to foster an interdisciplinary dialogue in order to identify important shared issues in visual search and selective attention and discuss ways of how these can be resolved using convergent methodologies: Psychophysics, mental chronometry, eyetracking, ERPs, source reconstruction, fMRI, investigation of (neuropsychological) impairments, TMS and computational modeling."

The meeting was held over three days, and organised by four general themes:

- Pre-attentive and post-selective processing in visual search (Keynote: Hermann Müller)
- The role of (working) memory guidance in visual search (Keynote: Chris Olivers, Martin Eimer)
- Brain mechanisms of visual search (Keynote: Glyn Humphreys)
- Modelling visual search (Keynote: Jeremy Wolfe).

Poster sessions gave grad students (including George Wallis and Nick Myers) a great chance to chat about their research with the invited speakers as well as other students tackling similar issues. 

Of course, a major highlight was the Bavarian beer. Soeren Kyllingsbaek was still to give his talk, presumably explaining the small beer in hand!

More photos of the meeting can be found here.

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All presentations can be downloaded from here