Is there more to visual attention than meets the eye?

Abstract

Models of saccade generation and visual selective attention must explain how and why particular targets are selected. Findlay & Walker do an excellent job of explaining the how of visual selection, but not the why. For a salience map to be more than a description of the relative importance of potential targets, there must be some account of the learning and inheritance that fashion its peaks and troughs. Point of gaze is not necessarily region of attention, and it may be premature to downgrade the role of covert attention in models of visual selection.