Distinguishing influences of overt and covert attention in anticipatory attentional target tracking.

This study investigated the relative contributions of overt and covert attention on the apparent anticipatory nature of attention in two experiments, using two different object tracking tasks, both combined with a probe detection task. In Experiment 1, we investigated the distribution of attention for overtly and covertly tracked targets separately at low tracking load using a single-object tracking task (one target, one distractor). We found anisotropic distributions of probe detection rates for both overtly tracked and covertly tracked targets, with highest detection rates at locations ahead of the target's movement.