To process the abundance of visual information we encounter in daily life, we use multiple strategies, including moving our eyes and paying attention to different locations. While we often pay attention to where we are looking, that isn't always the case: we can pay attention to things we aren't looking at, called covert attention. In this study, we looked at brain areas that respond to shifts in attention, and investigated how patterns of brain activity differ depending on where you are paying attention to. In the figure, orange regions have similar patterns of activity for maintaining attention at the same eye-centered location when moving your eyes, and shifting attention without moving your eyes. Green regions have similar patterns of activity for maintaining attention at the same world-centered location when moving your eyes, and shifting attention without moving your eyes. Overall, this research shows that throughout the brain, both eye-centered and world-centered attention across eye movements are represented more similarly to shifting attention than maintaining it, even though it feels like you are maintaining attention across the eye movement.
(Zhang & Golomb, 2021: Neural Representations of Covert Attention across Saccades: Comparing Pattern Similarity to Shifting and Holding Attention during Fixation)