Key Academic References

Resources · 2026-08-01

A curated selection of scientific papers and research on visual attention, perception and behavior.

How to use this list

A short, curated reading list behind Stopper Theory: the papers and books we return to most on visual attention, eye movements and attention in advertising. It is not exhaustive. It is the shortest path to the ideas the framework is built on.

Foundations of visual attention

  • Treisman, A. & Gelade, G. (1980). A feature-integration theory of attention. Cognitive Psychology, 12(1), 97–136.

  • Posner, M. I. (1980). Orienting of attention. Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology, 32(1), 3–25.

  • Kahneman, D. (1973). Attention and Effort. Prentice-Hall.

  • Desimone, R. & Duncan, J. (1995). Neural mechanisms of selective visual attention. Annual Review of Neuroscience, 18, 193–222.

  • Theeuwes, J. (2010). Top-down and bottom-up control of visual selection. Acta Psychologica, 135(2), 77–99.

  • Simons, D. J. & Chabris, C. F. (1999). Gorillas in our midst: Sustained inattentional blindness for dynamic events. Perception, 28(9), 1059–1074.

Saliency and computational models

  • Itti, L., Koch, C. & Niebur, E. (1998). A model of saliency-based visual attention for rapid scene analysis. IEEE Transactions on Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence, 20(11), 1254–1259.

  • Wolfe, J. M. (1994). Guided Search 2.0: A revised model of visual search. Psychonomic Bulletin & Review, 1(2), 202–238.

  • Borji, A. & Itti, L. (2013). State-of-the-art in visual attention modeling. IEEE Transactions on Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence, 35(1), 185–207.

  • Bylinskii, Z., Judd, T., Oliva, A., Torralba, A. & Durand, F. (2019). What do different evaluation metrics tell us about saliency models? IEEE Transactions on Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence, 41(3), 740–757.

Eye movements

  • Yarbus, A. L. (1967). Eye Movements and Vision. Plenum Press.

  • Rayner, K. (1998). Eye movements in reading and information processing: 20 years of research. Psychological Bulletin, 124(3), 372–422.

Attention in advertising and visual marketing

  • Pieters, R. & Wedel, M. (2004). Attention capture and transfer in advertising: Brand, pictorial, and text-size effects. Journal of Marketing, 68(2), 36–50.

  • Wedel, M. & Pieters, R. (2008). Eye tracking for visual marketing. Foundations and Trends in Marketing, 1(4), 231–320.

The attention economy

  • Davenport, T. H. & Beck, J. C. (2001). The Attention Economy: Understanding the New Currency of Business. Harvard Business School Press.

Where Stopper fits

The framework takes bottom-up saliency and figure–ground organisation from this literature, adds the vertical-scrolling context of social feeds, and tests the result with behavioural and biometric measurement in Stopper Lab. The doctoral research behind the Stopper Effect is being prepared for publication.