 The success of motor theories in accounting for the sorts of attention that are found in some typical attention-lab experiments can be given either an optimistic or a pessimistic interpretation. The optimistic interpretation sees the motor theory as providing a successful account of the processing underpinning some of attention’s simpler and more central varieties. The pessimistic interpretation sees the motor theory as revealing a problem with our usual experimental paradigms.  The participants in typical laboratory tasks direct their attention to different parts of their visual field, while keeping their eyes fixated on a central spot. The behavioural signatures of attention in such tasks are usually reductions in reaction time to the attended stimuli. The neural correlates of these behavioural signatures are certain biases as to which stimuli most strongly drive the neural circuitry that processes them. The central finding of the motor-theorists is that these neural and behavioural effects can result from attenuated versions of the activity responsible for directing eye movements. The pessimistic interpretation of this finding is as revealing that signs that have traditionally been taken to indicate the direction of attention are actually no more than consequences of the truncated eye-movements that our experimental paradigms induce, by imposing the restriction that experimental participants fixate their gaze on a single location. If that is right then the phenomenon studied in attention labs may not be the psychologically important one that it has been taken for.