There’s notice in Scientific American Online of a neurological study of owls showing that the coordination of sight and sound processing in the brain modulates attention: there is increased attention given to sounds that correlate with the direction of gaze. The article notes that this is the first nonprimate species in which this sort of phenomenon has been seen.

There is speculation mentioned that this sort of system may be common to all vertebrates. If so, that will be an interesting finding, since the underlying brain anatomy is not the same across all vertebrates. While the lateral superior olive is implicated as a part of the brain that links sight and sound in primates, those renowned sound processors, bats and dolphins, entirely lack the structure. I’m not sure what the neural architecture of the owl brain is, and a brief Google search doesn’t shed immediate light on whether owls have the lateral superior olive, either.