Tag: attention

Tasty review paper published in Vision

Last summer Soazig and I were approached about writing a review article on oculomotor readiness hypothesis / premotor theory for a special issue of Vision on “Eye Movements and Visual Cognition”. This was a very tempting opportunity, and I must admit I was flattered to be courted by psychology bigwigs like Klein and Liversedge, but I had a couple of reservations. Firstly, this is quite a crowded field, and there had already been some excellent reviews of the literature, including one I had written with Thomas Schenk just a few years ago. Did we really have something new to say? Could we produce something that offered more insight than just describing recent developments in the field? Secondly, writing any paper is time consuming, but with the pressures of the imminent REF there is a distinct disincentive to publishing papers that are not eligible for submission, such as review papers. On the flip side, writing a review seemed like a a great opportunity to articulate the theoretical ideas about attention and eye-movements that we had been bubbling around over the last few years and in the end the decision was easy.

We spent quite some time kicking round ideas for a structure and two key concepts formed the basis of the review. Firstly, that it was absolutely critical to explicitly a differentiate between presaccadic attention, covert endogenous attention and covert exogenous attention. Secondly, that the evidence from neuropsychological studies had been rather neglected in favour of psychophysical or neurophysiological evidence. Once we had these ideas, the review started to fall into place and we were able to develop our key lines of argument, which were (1) presaccadic attention is qualitatively different from covert attention, so studies of presaccadic attention don’t speak to oculomotor readiness / premotor theory per se (2) The neuropsychological evidence for a mandatory coupling between covert exogenous orienting and saccade programming is pretty strong, but the evidence is actually really weak for a causal link between endogenous attention and saccade programming. In the end we felt convinced that the evidence was most convincing for an oculomotor readiness theory of exogenous orienting, (hence the snazzy acronym of OREO) and we hope you will read the paper and be convinced too!

The paper is open access, and you can find it here: https://www.mdpi.com/2411-5150/3/2/17/htm

Casteau, S & Smith, D.T. (2019). Associations and Dissociations between Oculomotor Readiness and Covert Attention. Vision 3: 17.

Writing this review has been an interesting process, as it touches on some conceptual issues that Soazig and I have been struggling with over the last few years. One thing I have never understood is why saccade deviation away from an attended location is often cited as evidence for premotor theory. Everyone says it, but it makes no sense! Surely the saccade should be deviated towards the attended location if it’s associated with a saccade programme? Maybe now someone will explain it to me at our upcoming workshop on attention and motor control (all welcome 😊): http://motorbiasproject.com/workshop

Thoughts on Prof Tim Hodgson’s seminar on Development of Oculomotor Control

I was  delighted to welcome Prof Tim Hodgson from Lincoln University to Durham to give a seminar on his recent work exploring the development of oculomotor control in young children. His talk drew on a series of experiments conducted at the Lincoln Summer Scientist event where Tim and his team examined oculomotor behaviours in children as young as 3! The surprising result (to me at least!) was that very young children seemed to experience a ‘sticky fixation’, such that their gaze remained locked at fixation when a target jumped from fixation to the periphery, or when gaze cues were used to direct saccades. Gaze cues automatically activate saccade programmes in adults (e.g. Kuhn & Kingstone 2009), so the fact that these young children don’t reflexively follow gaze cues suggested to me that perhaps gaze-cueing is a learned, rather than instinctual behaviour (Cole Smith & Atkinson 2015). More provocatively, Tim also argued that even though the children’s eyes were ‘stuck’ at fixation, they were nevertheless able to covertly orient into the periphery. I harrumphed my approval at this little bit of premotor theory bashing but was mindful it was based on the observation that children were able to accurately report the appearance of a peripheral target, even though they failed to execute a saccade towards it. As Bob Kentridge suggested, perhaps there was overactive fixation which prevents the release of a saccade but not the programming of the saccade. All in all it was a fascinating and thought-provoking seminar. We then retired to the Vic for refreshments and further discussion.

Kuhn, G., & Kingstone, A. (2009). Look away! Eyes and arrows engage oculomotor responses automatically. Attention Perception & Psychophysics, 71(2), 314-327. doi:10.3758/app.71.2.314

Cole, G.G., Smith, D.T. & Atkinson, M.A. (2015). Mental state attribution and the gaze cueing effect. Attention, Perception, & Psychophysics 77(4): 1105-1115.

Dan Smith