Active orientation of body and eyes (and ears, etc.) to focus attention on a particular part of the immediate environment (in other words, to foveate a stimulus). It is overt because the act is visible to others, and provides an important social cue given sensitivity to gaze direction in humans and other animals. In contrast, covert attention does not involve eye movements, but mentally shifting the focus of attention. Debate about whether these two forms of attention are distinct or not seems to have been resolved in terms of depicting them as sharing the same central mechanisms (e.g., parietal lobe). Moreover, covert and overt attention are driven by the same visual input. In the ecological psychology of James J. Gibson (1904-1980), there are five modes of overt attention together with the superordinate system of orienting: looking, listening, feeling, smelling and tasting. There are other models of overt attention that more cognitively-based.
See Attention, Covert attention, Ecological psychology, Fovea, Frontal eye fields (FEF), Mutual gaze, Parietal lobe, Saccade / antisaccade movements, Stimulus orienting, Superior colliculus