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
ty. Now, imagery isn’t our usual sort of thing, but the chance to attend a free conference in our own backyard seemed to good to miss. On day 1 we saw some fascinating presentations from students in Shaun Boe’s lab who had travelled all the way from Dalhousie in Canada. The first thing to note is that most of the contemporary research was focused on AOMI (which everyone pronounced AY-OH-ME, much to Soazigs irritation). AOMI involves action observation (i.e. watching an expert do the task) while simultaneously engaging in mental imagery (imagining performing the action). The key message I took from these talks was that although it was generally agreed that mental imagery was jolly helpful for improving skills, there was no real agreement about either the optimal ‘dosage’ or at what point during skill acquisition AOMI was most effective. Boe’s group showed some pretty nice evidence that AOMI was most effective during skill acquisition; the ‘cognitive’ and ‘associative’ phases in Fitts & Posner (1967) model of expertise. In a particularly interesting finding, Sarah Kraeutner argued that imagery could reduce endpoint variability without necessarily improving overall accuracy in a dart throwing task. However, a number of audience members commented that although the dart-throwing paradigm is a classic task, it has problems as a model of skill acquisition, particularly with respect to controlling prior experience of the task. Also in this session was a fascinating talk from Jack Binks on using
imagery to rehabilitate motor skills after stoke. Richard Ramsay then gave an eclectic keynote covering cognitive and brain mechanisms of social perception, which I found particularly interesting with respect to our work with Geoff Cole on perspective taking and 
rt to reconcile or integrate these views, and we agreed this could be an area that is ripe for further study. The day 2 keynote was given by Robert Hardwick (KU Leuven), who presented a fascinating meta-analysis of studies examining imagery, action observation and action execution, and finished with an appeal to develop more theoretically principled models of mental imagery. Again, I was struck by the parallels between the dominance of Simulation Theory in the motor imagery literature and that of OMRH/PMT in the literature on spatial attention, and the need to develop beyond these ideas. There was also time for a bit of light schmoozing around the posters, and I was delighted to talk briefly with Zoe Franklin about TMS and eyetracking, Elaine Poliakoff about her work on imagery in Parkinsons Disease, Shaun Boe about his ideas on the neural and cognitive mechanisms underpinned AOMI, Gabriel Valadez Roque about using imagery to rehabilitate stroke patients in Mexico and Martin Edwards, with whom I mainly exchanged academic gossip 😉.
