Salient and emotional objects often attract our attention and draw our gaze towards them. However, most previous EEG studies investigated covert attention shifts by instructing participants to suppress natural eye-movements, leaving the neural time course of overt attention shifts yet unclear. This set of studies combined eye-tracking and EEG to measure overt shifts of attention in a gaze-contingent attention paradigm. Study 1 directly compared neural mechanisms of covert and overt attention shifts. Twenty-four participants either manually responded to peripheral targets while maintaining fixation (covert shift) or made a saccade towards them (overt shift). Posterior event-related potentials were comparable for overt and covert shifts of attention, suggesting that similar neural mechanisms are involved in both. However, an early fronto-central response differed between conditions, potentially reflecting saccade suppression during covert attention shifts. Therefore, overt measures may provide a clearer picture of more natural attention shifts, complementing previous findings. Study 2 compared overt shifts in the presence or absence of a competing stimulus in 41 participants. Eye-movement latencies towards peripheral targets were significantly shorter when no competing stimulus was present. The same latency pattern occurred for an early occipital response, suggesting that already very early ERPs can be related to subsequent overt shifts of attention. Study 3 additionally introduced emotional faces as stimuli to investigate effects of valence on attention shift latencies. The results shed light on early neural responses related to overt attention shifts, providing further information regarding the brain mechanisms underlying our attentional attraction towards emotional and salient stimuli.