Spatiotemporal modulation of attention during smooth pursuit eye movements.

The present investigation examined how attention is distributed across both space and time during smooth pursuit eye movements. This was accomplished by measuring manual button pressing latencies to the sudden appearance of a peripheral target during the onset, maintenance, or offset of the pursuit response to a step-ramp target motion. The results showed that manual response latencies were shorter for stimuli flashed ahead of the pursuit target than for those presented in its wake. In addition, the latencies to the peripheral target appearance were shorter overall during pursuit maintenance compared to pursuit onset or offset. Taken together, these results indicate that attention is significantly modulated both in space and time during smooth pursuit eye movements.