Eyes on the past: Gaze stability differs between temporal expectation and temporal attention

Does the timing of a preceding visual event affect when people deploy attention in the future? Temporal expectation and temporal attention are two distinct processes that interact at the behavioral and neural levels, improving performance and gaze stability. The preceding foreperiod—the interval between the preparatory signal and stimulus onset in the previous trial—modulates expectation at the behavioral and oculomotor levels. Here, we investigated whether the preceding foreperiod also modulates the effects of temporal attention and whether such effects interact with expectation.We found that, regardless of whether the stimulus occurred earlier than, later than, or at the expected moment in the preceding foreperiod, temporal attention improved performance and accelerated gaze stability onset and offset consistently by shifting microsaccade timing. However, overall, only with expected preceding foreperiods, attention inhibited microsaccade rates. Moreover, late preceding foreperiods weakened the expectation effects on microsaccade rates, but this weakening was overridden by attention. Altogether, these findings reveal that the oculomotor system’s flexibility does not translate to performance, and suggest that, although selection history can be used as one of the sources of expectation in subsequent trials, it does not necessarily determine, strengthen, or guide attentional deployment.