Attention and eye movement control: an overview

Abstract

A review of recent experimental and theoretical findings is presented which relates the results of neurophysiological and psychological research on attention and eye movement to cognitive theorizing. With respect to the relation between shifts of attention and saccadic eye movements, several experiments have demonstrated that it is possible to dissociate the line of attention from the gaze direction. On the other hand, there is some indirect (although not yet conclusive) evidence that saccadic eye movements always produce a concomitant shift of attention. Another question is whether there is a moment-to-moment control of each consecutive saccade and latency or whether indirect control models (i.e. planning several saccades in advance) are more appropriate. The function of attentional processes which have to coordinate stimulus driven (bottom-up) and concept driven (top-down) mechanisms are discussed and related to some studies investigating local and global scanpaths.