Are there effector-specific attentional systems?
Heiner Deubel
Department of Psychology, Ludwig-Maximilians-University, Munich, Germany
We demonstrated previously that both eye and hand movements bind visual attention to their target locations during movement preparation. However, it remains contentious whether eye and hand targets are selected jointly by a single selection system, or individually by independent systems. To unravel this controversy, we
investigated the deployment of visual attention – a proxy of motor target selection – in coordinated
eye-hand movements, using some newly developed methodological approaches. Results show that attention builds up in parallel both at the eye and the hand target. Importantly, the allocation of attention to one effector’s motor target is not affected by the concurrent preparation of the other effector’s movement at any time during movement preparation. This demonstrates that eye and hand targets are represented in separate, effector-specific maps of action-relevant locations. Moreover, both effector systems independently affect visual working memory.