Abstract

Two experiments examined whether saccadic eye movements and visuosspatial attention can be decoupled and whether orienting of attention to a location is equivalent to programming a saccadic eye movement to that location. Experiment 1, produced evidence against decoupling of attention and eye movements. Experiment 2, which used peripheral cues, produced no evidence for the separate and hierarchical reprogramming of saccade direction and amplitude as predicted by Rizzolatti et al. (1987). Further, there were dissociations between saccadic and simple manual responses such as a differential preference for targets in the upward and downward directions. The results suggest that, whenever a saccadic eye movement is about to be executed, the direction of visuospatial attention is constrained to be compatible with the direction of the eye movement. However, while there is thus a close association between saccadic eye movements and visuospatial attention, it does not seem to be the case that attentional orienting is identical to a program for an eye movement. © 1995 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.