Covert attention tracking: Towards two-dimensional real-time recordings

Achieving attention tracking as easily as recording eye movements is still beyond reach. However, by exploiting Steady-State Visual Evoked Potentials (SSVEPs) we could recently record in a satisfactory way the horizontal trajectory of covert visuospatial attention in single trials, both when attending target motion and during mental motion extrapolation. Here we show that, despite the different cortical functional architecture for horizontal and vertical motion processing, the same result is obtained for vertical attention tracking. Thus, it seems that trustworthy real-time two-dimensional attention tracking, with both physical and imagined target motion, is not a too far goal.