Dissociation between attentional and oculomotor habits.

Abstract

Attention and eye movements often align in visual tasks, but they can also dissociate, as when people shift attention without moving their eyes. Most studies have examined these systems over short timescales, capturing momentary attention or eye movements. Here, we explored their interaction over a longer timescale using a location probability learning paradigm. In Experiment 1, participants searched for a target that frequently appeared in one quadrant, developing both an oculomotor habit (initial saccades toward the high-probability quadrant) and an attentional habit (faster search when the target appeared in the high-probability region). Both habits emerged simultaneously and persisted in a neutral testing phase with random target locations. This coupling broke down in Experiments 2 and 3, where participants were cued to saccade toward specific quadrants that aligned or misaligned with the high-probability target quadrant. In a spatially unbiased testing phase without the cue, the oculomotor habit persisted toward the previously saccaded quadrant, while search speed was fastest in the high-probability area, unaffected by prior cuing. Thus, while oculomotor and attentional habits are often coupled, they arise from distinct mechanisms: oculomotor habits are driven by eye movement history, and attentional habits by search success. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2025 APA, all rights reserved).