Our research focuses on visual spatial attention, visual short-term memory, and central attentional limitations using the event-related potentials (ERPs) technique. Visual event-related potentials (ERPs) provide powerful tools to study the mechanisms mediating the deployment of visual spatial attention, visual short-term memory, and interactions between spatial attention and central attention. In our recent work we used the N2pc ERP component as a moment-to-moment index of the deployment of visual spatial attention. These studies explore how central attentional loads created in the context of paradigms used to study the attentional blink (AB) and the psychological refractory period (PRP) systematically modulate the N2pc, and presumably the ability to control visual spatial attention. Spatial attention is important for the selection of visual stimuli that are to be processed by later capacity-limited mechanisms. Visual short-term memory provides a temporary store for objects selected for further processing. This store has a very limited storage capacity (about 3 or 4 objects). VSTM can be studied using a later lateralized ERP component, the SPCN (sustained posterior contralateral negativity), which appears to be a specific index of neural activity mediating the maintenance of information in visual short-term memory. Recent work shows that activity in VSTM is sharply affected by concurrent central processing demands. The ERP work, using the ActiveTwo systems, is extended by concurrent studies of the electromagnetic response of the brain using a whole-head 275-channel magnetometer (VSM), and fMRI investigations of spatial attention and VSTM.