The small angle subtended by the human fovea places a premium on the ability to quickly and accurately direct the gaze to targets of interest. Thus the resultant saccadic eye fixations are a very instructive behaviour, revealing much about the underlying cognitive mechanisms that guide them. Of particular interest are the eye fixations used in hand-eye coordination. Such coordination has been extensively studied for single movements from a source location to a target location. In contrast, we have studied multiple fixations where the sources and targets are a function of a task and chosen dynamically by the subject according to task requirements. The task chosen is a copying task: subjects must copy a figure made up of contiguous coloured blocks as fast as possible. The main observation is that although eye fixations are used for the terminal phase of hand movements, they are used for other tasks before and after that phase. The analysis of the spatial and temporal details of these fixations suggests that the underlying decision process that moves the eyes leaves key decisions until just before they are required.

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It is much debated whether there is an anger superiority effect (ASE) in the recognition of facial expressions. Recent research has shown that the attentional demand of a task plays a vital role in the emergence and magnitude of the ASE. However, only a visual crowding task was employed to manipulate attentional demands, and it is unclear whether the emergence and magnitude of the ASE was contingent on the availability of attentional resources in general. The present study employed a dual‐task paradigm to manipulate the availability of attentional resources for facial expression discrimination in which participants were instructed to perform a central letter discrimination task and a peripheral facial expression discrimination task concurrently. Experiment 1 showed an ASE in the dual task but no ASE was yielded when the facial expression discrimination task was performed alone. Experiment 2 replicated this finding and further demonstrated a gradual shift from no ASE to an attenuated ASE and finally to a strong ASE as attentional resources that were available for facial expression discrimination gradually became limited. Together, these results suggest that the emergence and magnitude of the ASE is modulated by the availability of attentional resources, which supports an Attentional Demands Modulation Hypothesis of the ASE.