Attention in the wild: balancing flexibility and stability (opens in new tab)

To prioritize the visual processing of task-relevant objects in our surroundings, we rely on an attentional template—an internal representation of object features that guides attention toward potential targets. Decades of research have characterized attentional templates for simple targets in artificial arrays. How could templates function in real-world search, where target appearance is variable and objects are embedded in complex, dynamic scenes? We consider two possibilities: (i) flexible ...