The default allocation of attention is broadly ahead of smooth pursuit

Abstract

When moving through our environment, it is vital to preferentially process positions on our future path in order to react quickly to critical situations. During smooth pursuit, attention may be directed ahead with either a focused locus or a broad bias. We examined the 2D spatial extent of attention during a smooth pursuit task using both saccade (SRT) and manual (MRT) reaction times as measures of attentional allocation. Targets were flashed at various locations around current eye position while subjects pursued a moving target. Subjects made a saccade or pressed a button as soon as they perceived the target. Both SRTs and MRTs were shortest to targets flashed ahead of compared to behind the direction of pursuit across half of the visual field ahead of pursuit direction. Furthermore, we found an increase specific to SRTs at small target eccentricities directly ahead of pursuit, which may be related to an additional saccade trigger strategy; small saccades take longer to execute if smooth pursuit brings the eyes close to the target. In summary, both SRTs and MRTs revealed that attention is by default broadly allocated in the visual hemi-field ahead of the line of sight during smooth pursuit eye movements. This attentional bias may serve a predictive purpose for facilitating the processing of upcoming events.

Attentional trade-offs maintain the tracking of moving objects across saccades

“…Whereas no study has explored predictive shifts of covert attention in early visual areas, recent single-cell recordings in monkeys (Niebergall et al 2011) and event-related potentials in humans (Drew et al 2009;Doran and Hoffman 2010;Störmer et al 2013) have shown that visual responses in striate and extrastriate cortical areas show enhanced responses to tracked compared with untracked objects. Finally, during smooth pursuit, visual performance is highest at the current position of the target (Lovejoy et al 2009) or even ahead of it (van Donkelaar and Drew 2002; Khan et al 2010), both of which require predictive shifts of attention to compensate for the neural delays of the visuomotor system. Together, these findings hint at a possible neural architecture underlying the attentional enhancement in visual performance along the predicted motion path: attention-related areas index the current and future locations of a tracked object and facilitate visual processing at these locations by altering visual signals in striate and extrastriate cortex.…”

[Paper] Eye-Position Distribution Depending on Head Orientation when Observing Movies on Ultrahigh-Definition Television

“…This contrasts to the eye movements after head movements to shift gaze by top-down attention or during a task-related gaze shift as viewing static images [11]. Second, the eyes track the object smoothly (pursuits eye movements) when viewers look at a moving object [12,13]. And the eyes can ignore the motion caused by self-motion [14].…”

Dynamic visuomotor synchronization: Quantification of predictive timing

“…Attention is or can readily be allocated ahead of a moving target during predictive visual tracking (Khan, Lefèvre, Heinen, & Blohm, 2010; Lovejoy, Fowler, & Krauzlis, 2009; van Donkelaar & Drew, 2002). Such attention allocation is usually covert in that the gaze is maintained on the target; that is, the urge to shift the gaze to the center of attention away from the target is suppressed.…”