Cells in saccade control areas respond if a saccade is about to bring a target into their receptive fields (J. R. Duhamel, C. L. Colby, & M. R. Goldberg, 1992). This remapping process should shift the retinal location from which attention selects target information (P. Cavanagh, A. R. Hunt, S. R. Afraz, & M. Rolfs, 2010). We examined this attention shift in a masking experiment where target and mask were presented just before an eye movement. In a control condition with no eye movement, masks interfered with target identification only when they spatially overlapped. Just before a saccade, however, a mask overlapping the target had less effect, whereas a mask placed in the target's remapped location was quite effective. The remapped location is the retinal position the target will have after the upcoming saccade, which corresponds to neither the retinotopic nor spatiotopic location of the target before the saccade. Both effects are consistent with a pre-saccadic shift in the location from which attention selects target information. In the case of retinally aligned target and mask, the shift of attention away from the target location reduces masking, but when the mask appears at the target's remapped location, attention's shift to that location brings in mask information that interferes with the target identification.

How do we know where we are looking? Our direction of gaze is commonly thought to be assigned to the location in the world that falls on our fovea, but this may not always hold, especially, as we report here, just before an eye movement. Observers shifted their gaze to a clock with a fast-moving hand and reported the time perceived to be on the clock when their eyes first landed. The reported time was 39 ms earlier than the actual time the eyes arrived. In a control condition, the clock moved to the eyes, mimicking the retinal motion but without the eye movement. Here the reported time lagged 27 ms behind the actual time on the clock when it arrived. The timing of perceived fixation in our experiment is similar to that for the predictive activation observed in visual cortex neurons at the time of eye movements.

In a series of related experiments, we asked people to choose whether to split their attention between two equally likely potential tasks or to prioritize one task at the expense of the other. In such a choice, when the tasks are easy, the best strategy is to prepare for both of them. As difficulty increases beyond the point at which people can perform both tasks accurately, they should switch strategy and focus on one task at the expense of the other. Across three very different tasks (target detection, throwing, and memory), none of the participants switched their strategy at the correct point. Moreover, the majority consistently failed to modify their strategy in response to changes in task difficulty. This failure may have been related to uncertainty about their own ability, because in a version of the experiment in which there was no uncertainty, participants uniformly switched at an optimal point.

People are unable to accurately report on their own eye movements most of the time. Can this be explained as a lack of attention to the objects we fixate? Here, we elicited eye-movement errors using...