Submit a Manuscript to the Journal
Visual Cognition

For a Special Issue on
Handling Visual Distraction

While the visual environment contains massive amounts of information, we should not and cannot pay attention to all events. Instead, we need to direct attention to those objects and events that are relevant and suppress or ignore those that are distracting and irrelevant. Even though a great deal of progress has been made over the last 30 years or so, many questions regarding how people handle visual distraction are still unresolved, for example:

• What are the mechanisms that allow us to resist distraction from salient events?
• Under what conditions is resisting distraction by salient events possible?
• Does resisting distraction have consequences for other processes?
• What are the neuro-cognitive mechanisms underlying efficient distractor handling?
• Are there individual differences in the extent to which one can resist distraction?
• Is it possible to train to be less vulnerable to distraction?

The answers have tremendous applied (as well as societal) implications, ranging from the safe design of advanced technical (e.g., augmented-reality) environments that avoid over-challenging attentional selectivity through therapeutic interventions in especially distraction-prone clinical populations to optimizing our capacity to cope with distraction through various forms of learning.

The special issue is open for empirical research, review articles and theory/opinion papers on either fundamental or applied aspects of handling visual distraction; we welcome submissions related to any of the processes involved in avoiding or overcoming distraction or to the consequences of (handling) distraction in the real world. Neuroimaging, eye-tracking, modeling, and purely behavioral studies are all welcome. In the tradition of a series of special issues and conferences on “Visual Search and Selective Attention”, we expect that many presenters at the most recent Ammersee conference and members of a related CAS^LMU Research Group (CAS^LMU = Center for Advanced Studies at LMU Munich) will contribute to the special issue and that most submissions will relate to visual search or visual working memory. But we are, of course, happy to consider work on visual distraction beyond this community.

If you want to find out whether your planned manuscript would be a good fit for our special issue, please don’t hesitate to get in touch with [email protected] or any of the other guest editors.

Please follow Visual Cognition’s standard instructions on manuscript preparation (click on “Instructions for authors” below).  There is no hard word limit and initial submissions can be in any standard scholarly format (we recommend APA7) in US or UK English (Word, RTF, ODT, or PDF files).
When you are ready to submit, click on “Submit an article” and select “Special Issue” as the “Type” on Step 1 of the submission process. At Step 6, you will be asked whether the manuscript is a candidate for a special issue; please click “Yes” and select “Handling Visual Distraction” from the dropdown list. We aim for publishing the special issue in early 2024.

Instructions for AuthorsSubmit an Article