Our visual experience begins with the independent detection of photons, but our percepts are of unified objects and scenes. Moreover, our visual scene is often cluttered, yet we manage to attend to the most important things in our environment. These topics frame our research, which explores the mechanisms underlying several aspects of visual perception and attentional selection. Our approach to investigating visual perception and attention is developmental cognitive neuroscience. That is, we use visually evoked potentials (VEPs) and psychophysics across typical and atypical development. By looking at behavior and its neural correlates across development, we hope to understand how "seeing" whole objects and textures is derived from individual elements.