Is covert attention really unnecessary?

We are largely in agreement with the Findlay & Walker model. However, they appear to dismiss the role of covert spatial attention in tasks in which pe ople are free to move their eyes. We argue that an account of the facts abo ut the perceptual span in reading requires a window of attention not center ed around the fovea. Moreover, a computational moder of reading that we (Re ichle at al. 1998) developed gives a good account of eye movement control i n reading and would be unable to do so without relying heavily on covert at tention.