Some of the central problems to be solved by the brain, such as figure-ground coding and object recognition, concern the binding of separately coded feature elements into coherent object representations. The binding problem has recently been approached by a variety of disciplines, notably psychophysics, and experimental psychology, electrophysiology, neurophysiology and computational modelling. This special issue brings together a collection of papers principally from psychology and computational modelling. These papers address issues in Gestalt formation, the relation of grouping and binding processes to visual attention, the role of temporal factors for grouping and binding, the neuronal correlates of binding mechanisms, the development of binding operations in infants and the breakdown of these processes following brain injury.