Three central problems in the recent literature on visual attention ar
e reviewed. The first concerns the control of attention by top-down (o
r goal-directed) and bottom-up (or stimulus-driven) processes. The sec
ond concerns the representational basis for visual selection, includin
g how much attention can be said to be location- or object-based. Fina
lly, we consider the time course of attention as it is directed to one
stimulus after another.