What we see and understand about the visual world is tightly tied to where we direct our eyes. High-resolution visual information is acquired from only a very limited region of the scene surrounding the fixation point, with the quality of visual input falling off precipitously from central vision into a low-resolution visual surround. This special issue of Visual Cognition brings together cutting-edge research from eight research groups around the world whose work is focused on these important topics. The goal of this special issue is to facilitate a constructive convergence of behavioral data and computational modeling to explore the fundamental nature of attention control, and particularly eye movement control, in viewing complex visual input.