ABSTRACT
This chapter reviews evidence supporting the claim that the covert attention system plays an important role in guiding overt orienting based on eye movements. The most heavily researched area involving attentional control of eye movements is in the area of saccades, which are rapid, ballistic changes in eye position that occur at rate of about 3-4 per second. The parallel model would need some sort of control structure spelled out so that eye movements could be triggered at appropriate times. Increasing attention to the target discrimination task should be accompanied by increases in performance on that task at a cost of slower eye movements. Pursuit or smooth eye movements serve to keep a moving target stable on the retina, reducing image blur and maintaining the position of the object in the fovea. Visual information regarding the spatial layout and identity of objects in environment requires several kinds of orienting mechanisms.
