Cognitive Physiology: Moving the Mind’s Eye Before the Head’s Eye Dispatch

Under natural conditions, shifts of spatial attention are often followed by matching eye movement. Recent evidence suggests that this close coupling is reflected in the ability of the same cortical area to shift eye position and the locus of attention. When studying the visual system of primates, one cannot avoid being awed by the beauty, complexity and shear power of this product of evolution. At the same time, the primate visual system as we know it today is a compromise between several conflicting interests and selection pressures. At first sight the task for evolution seems to be simply to design a visual system that provides an organism with the most accurate and complete picture of its environment. While some performance parameters of human visio