BBS: Pay Attention to Eye Movement Behavior

We got the band back together! Hayward Godwin, Michael Hout, and I (who previously collaborated on this tutorial on eye movement experiments) have written a response to a provocative piece by Ruth Rosenholtz in Behavioral & Brain Sciences where she argues for an abandonment of the concept of “attention” as an explanatory tool. She suggests that the attention research program is in crisis and that we need a fundamental reset where we avoid invoking attention when trying to understand visual processing. We take aim at one of the fundamental flaws in Rosenholtz’s reasoning. Rosenholtz discounts the utility of examining eye movements. Not only do eye movements carry valuable information for vision scientists, but they can validate attentional explanations for phenomena in visual cognition. We ignore them to our own detriment!

Full reference: Godwin, H. J., Hout, M. C., & Barnhart, A. S. (2025). Pay attention to eye movement behavior. Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 48, e141. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0140525X25000275