Elsevier

Cognitive Brain Research

Volume 18, Issue 1, December 2003, Pages 102-105
Cognitive Brain Research

Short communication
Covert and overt voluntary attention: linked or independent?

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cogbrainres.2003.08.006Get rights and content

Abstract

Recent evidence indicates that reflexive shifts in spatial attention with eye movements (overt orienting) and without eye movements (covert orienting) can be dissociated [J. Exp. Psychol. Hum. Percept. Perform., in press]. Here, we show that a similar dissociation exists for voluntary shifts in overt and covert attention. Our study is consistent with general theories of attention that assume bottom-up (reflexive) processes and top-down (voluntary) processes converge on a common neural architecture.

Section snippets

Acknowledgements

This research was funded through grants to A.R. Hunt and to A. Kingstone from the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada and grants to A. Kingstone from the Michael Smith Foundation for Health Research and the Human Frontiers Science Program. Data from this study were reported at the 8th Annual Meeting of the Canadian Society for Brain, Behaviour, and Cognitive Science, in Ottawa, Ontario (Ennis and Kingstone, 1998). We are extremely grateful to Tricia Ennis for data

References (20)

There are more references available in the full text version of this article.

Cited by (158)

  • The selection balance: Contrasting value, proximity and priming in a multitarget foraging task

    2022, Cognition
    Citation Excerpt :

    In the current study, we therefore investigated the mechanisms underlying target identification, notably by examining the potential involvement of eye movements during target selection. Current theories of visual orienting indicate that the identification process could either be achieved with overt shifts of attention and involve eye movements, or could be achieved with covert shifts of attention, not accompanied by eye movements (Posner & Cohen, 1980; see also Hunt & Kingstone, 2003). Although there is a large literature on eye movement behaviour during single-target visual search (for a review, see Eckstein, 2011), oculomotor dynamics during visual foraging are far less well known (Kosovicheva, Alaoui-Soce, & Wolfe, 2020; Tagu & Kristjánsson, 2020).

View all citing articles on Scopus
View full text