Talk:Premotor theory of attention
The Authors likely believe that the term is clear enough, however it seems to me that “premotor” warrants a brief explanation at the outset.
The so-called meridian effect is convincing especially because it manifests itself despite the fact that the unattended locations in the same and the opposite hemifields are equidistant from the cued location. That should be mentioned.
The Authors say that, when the target appears in the uncued location there is first a DECISION on the saccade direction and then a DECISION on the saccade amplitude. I doubt “decision” is the correct term. It conveys the impression of a conscious process, which is certainly not the case for a change in amplitude and perhaps in the case of direction either.
The way the results of the study by Eimer et al. (2005) are described on page 4 (top) is rather obscure.
Reviewer C:
This review is complete and clearly written therefore I only have minor comments:
The study of Eimer et al., 2005 investigates the effects of covert manual movement preparation on somatosensory processing. This should be mentioned.
Recent evidences from behavioural and ERP studies seem to suggest that the effects of eye movement preparation on perception are by no means restricted to the visual domain. For instance, participants were reliably faster to respond to auditory stimuli (Rorden & Driver, 1999) when these were presented close to the target of a saccadic eye movement. Similar results were found for the tactile modality with enhanced tactile performance at the destination of an upcoming saccade (Rorden, Greene, Sasine & Baylis, 2002; Juravle & Deubel, 2009). Furthermore, saccade preparation and covert orienting of attention have similar spatially selective effects on auditory (Gherri, Driver & Eimer, 2008) as well as somatosensory processing (Gherri & Eimer, 2008). Taken together these results seem to suggest that covert eye movement preparation elicits a shift of attention in the direction of an upcoming saccade able to affect not just visual stimuli but also tactile and auditory stimuli.
Reviewer B:
Reviewer B: This is a succinct description of recent work which I could not improve on.
