Remember Highlights magazine? If you’re as old as I am and ever sat in a children’s dentist’s office in the ’70s or ’80s, you undoubtedly have fond memories of the page known as “Hidden Pictures,” a crude yet captivating drawing of a scene, such as a beachfront or a school playground, embedded with hidden objects: an anchor, a peanut, a hammer. You would consult the guide, which showed you what you had to find, and then set your little self to work feverishly plowing every square inch of the page. It was all the more fun with a friend, when it became a heated race. And there was no bigger bummer than turning to Page 7 (where “Hidden Pictures” lived) to find that some inconsiderate jerk had already circled them.

In the early 20th century, American newspapers regularly printed these sorts of brainteasers. (“Twenty very pretty summer girls are hidden in the picture,” ran a puzzle in a San Francisco paper in 1913. “How many of them can you find?”) But artists have been playing with these techniques for millenniums. Chinese landscape painters of the Tang and Song dynasties hid tiny man-made structures in their sweeping mountain scenes. And visitors still crowd around the “Unicorn Rests in a Garden” tapestry at the Met Cloisters, trying to spot the frog in the medieval foliage.

Scientists tell us that tasks like solving puzzles or finding hidden images are linked to the brain’s reward system. “Aha” moments when we locate an elusive item release a hit of dopamine, which creates a sensation of pleasure and motivates us to keep going. This may help explain why Highlights has never stopped running “Hidden Pictures,” and why the Where’s Waldo?, I Spy and Can You See What I See? series are still going strong, decades after their debuts.

Not counting the special editions, spinoffs and activity book versions, WHERE’S WALDO? THE MIGHTY MAGICAL MIX-UP (32 pp., Candlewick, $18.99, ages 5 to 9) is the eighth book in Martin Handford’s series starring the iconic bespectacled traveler — and the first new one in 15 years. Here, Wizard Whitebeard (a recurring character in the Waldo universe) has lost his magic staff, resulting in a time-space mishap with robots in the Stone Age and dinosaurs in the Wild West. Scanning its pages, I felt a rush of nostalgia recalling the hours my kids and I spent oohing and aahing over Waldo when they were little. I can’t say this one is as eye-popping as the old ones (I’m partial to “Where’s Waldo? In Hollywood”), but it delivers the goods nonetheless, displaying Handford’s knack for layering his cacophonous crowd scenes with humor.

My kids and I weren’t big fans of the popular I Spy series by the photographer Walter Wick, which debuted in 1992. This was probably because Wick’s still-life assemblages lacked the whimsy of Waldo, and (to my mind) had a less intriguing visual style. So I was pleasantly surprised to find myself sucked into THE CURIOSITY SHOP (40 pp., Cartwheel Books/Scholastic, $18.99, ages 4 to 8), the 11th book in his Can You See What I See? series, launched in 2002, which has more of a narrative, cinematic quality than I Spy. This book is set in a mysterious shop stocked floor to ceiling with things like vintage maps, marionettes, colored glass and antique toys, which readers are directed by the book’s rhymes to identify (“3 safety pins,/2 electric guitars,/an ON/OFF switch,/a bus, 8 cars”). Each scene cleverly leads to the next — zooming in, pulling back or rounding a corner like a virtual real estate tour. It’s stunning and atmospheric.

A noteworthy new addition to the category is ALFIE EXPLORES A TO Z (80 pp., Random House, $21.99, ages 4 to 8), by Jeff Drew, which takes the form of an alphabet book. Each letter launches a phantasmagoric scenario chock-a-block with human-clothed animals and unexpected combinations of objects — all rendered in the digital illustrator’s engaging retro-realistic style, reminiscent of midcentury advertising. Drew notes that he took 10 years to create this book, and its mind-bogglingly dense compositions reflect that dedication. The “S” page, for instance, features more than 100 “S”-related objects and scenarios (think Siberian husky in a Santa suit). Hardcore search-and-finders will also appreciate the answer key in the back — something I always wished the Waldo books included.

But even the most sophisticated Adobe Illustrator creations often lack the charm of art done by hand.

CAKE FOR EVERYONE (32 pp., Gecko, $18.99, ages 4 to 7), by Thé Tjong-Khing, doesn’t fit the mold of other search-and-find books, as its illustrations are spare and the items to find aren’t called out. It’s a wordless story about a group of animals on a picnic trying to track down their scattered possessions (the frog’s hat, the pig’s parasol, the bunny’s doll) — and, of course, the titular cake — after an eagle scoops up their loaded blanket, flies high up into the air, gets intercepted by another bird and drops it. This format gives readers room to decide for themselves what needs finding and to whom it belongs. The dopamine hit comes when they notice something the characters have missed. Tjong-Khing’s watercolor images have a delicate wit and warmth, imbuing the book with an emotional quality most search-and-finds lack.

Which brings me to my all-time favorite search-and-find book (though it doesn’t bill itself as one): “WHO NEEDS DONUTS?,” the hallucinogenic pen-and-ink masterpiece by Mark Alan Stamaty (Dial Books), a longtime cartoonist for The Village Voice. It was originally published in 1973, so I should have been enjoying it during my Highlights days. Alas, instilled back then with Goofus-and-Gallant suburban innocence, I failed to discover Stamaty’s classic until its 30th-anniversary rerelease in 2003. The plot revolves around a boy on a quest for doughnuts in “the Big City,” but its star is the surreal and kaleidoscopic rendition of gritty 1970s New York, complete with toothy weirdos, pigeon-winged miniature horses and store signs advertising services such as safety pin repair. My kids and I spent many evenings enthralled as we pored over its pages, taking turns setting challenges to find odd details like “the lady with a fish on her head.”

But what makes “Who Needs Donuts?” so captivating isn’t merely its visual overload of minuscule jokes and absurd sight gags that compel you to slow down and focus on the terrain. It’s Stamaty’s ability to construct a world bursting with subversive humor and chaos, turning the search into an adventure that feels a bit dangerous. Readers, especially those with a taste for the dark and off-kilter, will want to return to it again and again.