Both visual attention and visual working memory tend to be studied with very simple stimuli and low-level paradigms, designed to allow us to understand the representations and processes in detail, or with fully realistic stimuli that make such precise understanding difficult but are more representative of the real world. In this chapter we argue for an intermediate approach in which visual attention and visual working memory are studied by scaling up from the simplest settings to more complex settings that capture some aspects of the complexity of the real-world, while still remaining in the realm of well-controlled stimuli and well-understood tasks. We believe this approach, which we have been taking in our labs, will allow a more generalizable set of knowledge about visual attention and visual working memory while maintaining the rigor and control that is typical of vision science and psychophysics studies.
Scaling up visual attention and visual working memory to the real world