Prediction of social and physical events is critical to fluent social interaction. Predictions can be informed by social cues such as gaze direction, head orientation, and pointing and other hand gestures. These social signals are especially strong spatial cues that automatically orient visuo-spatial attention to a specific referent or spatial location. Goal directed actions, such as reaching, also automatically orient attention, in the form of predictive saccades that arrive to the goal of the action before it is completed. These anticipatory eye movements are most often described as a result of motor simulation of the observed actions instead of as a shift in spatial attention. These two mechanisms, spatial attention and motor simulation, make similar predictions about how an observed reach would affect responses. However, research in these fields tend to focus on one of these possible explanations and largely ignores the influence of the other. The current study addresses this gap by first investigating how a dynamic reaching action automatically orients attention and then by studying the role of the motor simulation of actions in attention orienting. In four experiments, I show a facilitation of eye movement (Experiments 1, 3, & 4), keypress (Experiment 2) and mouse movement (Experiment 3) responses that are congruent with the direction of the reaching action over responses that are in the opposite direction. Additionally, isolating the effects of spatial attention and simulation (Experiment 3) demonstrates that each contributes to the processing of the observed action. Finally, interfering with the ability to simulate the action (Experiment 4) results in no differences between congruent and incongruent responses which suggests that motor simulation is necessary for the mechanism that drives predictive eye movements to the goals of observed reaching actions. These findings suggest that both visuo-spatial attention and motor simulation are active components in a system that processes the observed actions of others and responds appropriately.