This special issue of Visual Cognition collects some 30 articles on Visual Search and Attention by leading experts from a variety of disciplines, including experimental psychology, neuropsychology, neurophysiology and computational modelling. The articles are updated versions of papers presented at the 2003 Munich Visual Search Symposium. The symposium's goal, carried forward in this collection, was to foster an interdisciplinary dialogue, in order to identify important shared issues and consider ways of how these can be resolved using convergent methodologies. Reflecting the symposium discussions, the Special Issue is divided into four thematic sections: preattentive processing and role of memory in visual search, brain mechanisms and computational modelling of visual search.