Covert and overt voluntary attention: linked or independent?

Recent evidence indicates that reflexive shifts in spatial attention with eye movements (overt orienting) and without eye movements (covert orienting) can be dissociated [J. Exp. Psychol. Hum. Percept. Perform., in press]. Here, we show that a similar dissociation exists for voluntary shifts in overt and covert attention. Our study is consistent with general theories of attention that assume bottom-up (reflexive) processes and top-down (voluntary) processes converge on a common neural architecture.