Associations and Dissociations between Oculomotor Readiness and Covert Attention

Abstract

The idea that covert mental processes such as spatial attention are fundamentally dependent on systems that control overt movements of the eyes has had a profound influence on theoretical models of spatial attention. However, theories such as Klein’s Oculomotor Readiness Hypothesis (OMRH) and Rizzolatti’s Premotor Theory have not gone unchallenged. We previously argued that although OMRH/Premotor theory is inadequate to explain pre-saccadic attention and endogenous covert orienting, it may still be tenable as a theory of exogenous covert orienting. In this article we briefly reiterate the key lines of argument for and against OMRH/Premotor theory, then evaluate the Oculomotor Readiness account of Exogenous Orienting (OREO) with respect to more recent empirical data. These studies broadly confirm the importance of oculomotor preparation for covert, exogenous attention. We explain this relationship in terms of reciprocal links between parietal ‘priority maps’ and the midbrain oculomotor centres that translate priority-related activation into potential saccade endpoints. We conclude that the OMRH/Premotor theory hypothesis is false for covert, endogenous orienting but remains tenable as an explanation for covert, exogenous orienting.

On the link between attentional search and the oculomotor system: Is preattentive search restricted to the range of eye movements?

“…It therefore seems very unlikely that the impairment in feature search can be explained solely by differences in the sensory properties of the stimuli. These results are consistent with our previous observations of impaired covert feature search beyond the EOMR (Smith & Archibald, 2018;Smith et al, 2014, Experiment 1;Smith et al, 2010), and a number of studies demonstrating that exogenous covert orienting is impaired beyond the EOMR (Casteau & Smith 2019;Smith et al, 2010;Smith et al, 2014; although also see Hanning, Szinte, & Deubel, 2019). Together, these studies are evidence that placing a salient target beyond the range of eye movements reduces the efficiency with which it can reflexively summon attention.…”

“…Overall, these data suggest that feature search tasks which engage efficient 'preattentive' search processes are delayed when the target appears at locations that cannot be the goal of a saccadic eye movement, whereas conjunction search tasks which require inefficient, 'attentive' processes are unaffected. On first inspection, these findings are consistent with our previous findings that exogenous, covert orienting is constrained by the EOMR (Casteau & Smith 2019;Smith et al, 2014;Smith et al, 2010;, and the idea that reflexive attentional processes are tightly coupled with the oculomotor system, as predicted by oculomotor readiness theories of exogenous orienting (Casteau & Smith, 2019;. However, there are some caveats.…”

“…This manipulation had no effect on conjunction search, although we speculated that it may have also reduced the efficacy of guided search. This result is consistent with the oculomotor readiness theory of exogenous orienting (Casteau & Smith 2019), and we propose that the relationship between the oculomotor system and visual attention is best understood in terms of a biased competition model of attention in which activation in the oculomotor system biases selection towards the potential goal of an eye movement.…”

What Neuroscientific Studies Tell Us about Inhibition of Return

“…With this manipulation, wherein cues and targets can be presented at locations that the eyes cannot reach, normal IOR and endogenous orienting were observed, but attention was not exogenously captured by peripheral cues. Although we are aware of one study with conflicting results [36], the discrepancy may be rooted in the difficulty of firm conclusions from the eye-abduction manipulation [37].…”

Evaluating Preschool Visual Attentional Selective-Set: Preliminary ERP Modeling and Simulation of Target Enhancement Homology

“…Relative to goal-directed actions (manifested with behavioral responses), selective-set (as defined by Kahneman and Triesman [1]) is a mechanism of selective attention which underlies the ability of detecting task-relevant target information while ignoring (temporally simultaneous or separate) irrelevant information within a sequence of stimuli [1]. In many variations of the selective-set paradigm, generally associated with larger neuronal and significantly higher electrophysiological activity (see review in [36]) or eye-movement activity [37] concurrent to targets as compared to distractors.…”