Abstract
Inhibition of return (IOR) is the term used to describe the phenomenon whereby stimuli appearing at recently attended locations are reacted to less efficiently than stimuli appearing at locations that have not yet been attended. In the present study, we employed a typical IOR paradigm with peripheral uninformative cues while participants maintained their eyes at fixation. Eye position was monitored at a high sampling rate (500 Hz) in order to detect miniature eye movements called microsaccades, which have been shown to be crucial for avoiding disappearance of visual image. However, recent studies have demonstrated a close relationship between covert endogenous attentional shifts and the direction of microsaccades. Here, we demonstrate that the direction of microsaccades can be biased away from the peripheral location occupied by a salient, although task-irrelevant, visual signal. Because microsaccades are known not to be under conscious control, our results suggest strong links between IOR and unconscious oculomotor programming.
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Acknowledgements
This research was supported by an MIUR grant to M. Turatto. We are indebted to Massimiliano Pastore for helpful advice on data analysis, and to Reinhold Kliegl for allowing us to use the microsaccade detection algorithm and for very useful comments on previous drafts of the manuscript. We also thank Martin Rolfs and an anonymous reviewer for valuable suggestions.
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Galfano, G., Betta, E. & Turatto, M. Inhibition of return in microsaccades. Exp Brain Res 159, 400–404 (2004). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00221-004-2111-y
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s00221-004-2111-y