Gilchrist and Findlay (2003: 180) call for a “rich model’ for this “primary sense” which, ultimately, must embrace not only active vision, “but “also the active human.” From their perspective (2003: 3):

We say that something ‘catches our eye’ when we orient and look at it. We can, however, also look at one thing and be attending to another. Overt attention is the term we will use to describe attending by means of looking and covert attention will be used to describe attending without looking, often colloquially termed looking out of the corner of the eye. The rod cells of peripheral vision provide raw data for targeted orienting movements and subsequent foveal recognition during fixations.

For Gilchrist and Findlay (2001: 85) the weight of experimental evidence suggests that: attentional processes may operate to assist in pre-processing information in the visual periphery at the location to which the eyes are about to be directed. Covert attention to peripheral locations thus acts to supplement… actual movements of the eyes. Visual change in the periphery has the effect of summoning attention to its location.

John M. Findlay and Iain D. Gilchrist (2003) Active Vision: The Psychology of Looking and Seeing. Oxford University Press. UK.

Findlay , J. M. and Gilchrist, I. D. (2001) Visual Attention: the Active Vision Perspective. In M. Jenkins and L. Harris (Eds). Vision and Attention. Springer Verlag.