Changing perspectives on goal-directed attention control: The past, present, and future of modeling fixations during visual search

People make eye movements while interacting with objects, and these behaviors are rich with information about how visual goals are represented in the brain and used to prioritize sequential motor behavior. Here we adopt a real-world perspective and define goal-directed attention control as the guidance (or biasing) of gaze to target-object goals that have uncertain visual appearance. Specifically, we review models of goal-directed attention control that have attempted to predict the behavioral fixations made in the search for target-category goals in images. We will show how modeling perspectives on this question changed over the decades. Using the year 2020 as a reference, we will critically review the recent past of the categorical search modeling literature (~ 2000–2010), the literature defining our present (~ 2010–2020), and speculate about the future of search models and the directions that the literature may turn in the next decade (~ 2020–2030).