Over the past decades, ‘visual search and selective attention’ has become a core topic in the cognitive neuro-sciences, sparking an abundance of methodological and theoretical advances. In fact, the recent years have seen an exponential increase in published articles with keywords ‘visual search’, ‘visual attention’, and ‘visual working memory’! Thus, while there is a rapidly expanding research output, this engenders a growing need to keep the field together. To contribute to the latter is the main purpose of our symposium series, that is, (i) to bring together a group of world-leading scientists engaged in the field of VSSA, (ii) who represent different theoretical stances and methodological approaches, (iii) the aim being to foster scientific exchange and discussions across the various viewpoints and, ideally, helping to identify the most promising directions for future research.