Visual attention - a fresh look

For the last 25 years visual attention has been a highly popular research area within experimental psychology. Yet frequently visual attention is conceived of simply as a mental process occurring within the visual brain. This excludes a fundamental characteristic of vision: our eyes are continually mobile, making several discrete shifts of gaze every second, millions every month, although we are largely unaware that we are doing so. In this article we discuss why the mainstream study of visual attention has so often ignored eye movements and present an alternative - active vision - in which eye movements are assigned a central role.