Elsevier

Cognition

Volume 97, Issue 3, October 2005, Pages B55-B62
Cognition

Brief article
Is inhibition of return a reflexive effect?

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cognition.2005.02.003Get rights and content

Abstract

The inhibition of return (IOR) phenomenon is routinely considered an effect of reflexive attention because the paradigm used to generate IOR employs peripheral cues that are uninformative as to where a target will appear. Because the cues are spatially unreliable it is thought that there is no reason for attention to be committed volitionally to them, and hence, the IOR effect is considered reflexive. What has been generally overlooked, however, is that the cues provide reliable temporal information as to when a target will occur. This predictive information is used by participants to prepare volitionally for when a target is likely to appear. We investigated whether the IOR effect is a product of the volitional application of attention to peripheral cues for the use of their temporal information. To test this idea we rendered the temporal information provided by peripheral cues unreliable. While this eliminated participants using the cues volitionally, it did not abolish the IOR phenomenon. These data demonstrate two new findings. First, the IOR effect is fundamentally a reflexive phenomenon. Second, when peripheral cues are not used volitionally, the IOR effect is attenuated. Together, the present findings indicate that the IOR effect can be modulated by volitional (top-down) processes but it is not the product of them. We argue that an intimate link between fronto-parietal regions and the superior colliculus provide a functional neural mechanism for this volitional effect to impact IOR.

Section snippets

IOR as a reflexive phenomenon

One line of evidence supporting the view that IOR is reflexive concerns the superior colliculus (SC), a primitive subcortical neural system. Posner, Rafal, Choate, and Vaughan (1985) were the first to suggest that IOR may be mediated by the SC. They found that patients suffering from degeneration of the midbrain, including the SC, do not produce an IOR effect, whereas comparable patients without midbrain damage do exhibit IOR (see also Danziger, Fendrich, & Rafal, 1997). More recently, IOR has

Is the IOR effect really a reflexive phenomenon?

While it is true that the cue does not predict where a target will appear, the cue is highly predictive as to when a target will appear. In other words, although there is no reason to attend to the cue based on its unreliable spatial information, there is good reason to attend to the cue because of its reliable temporal information (Milliken et al., 2003, Mondor, 1999; see also Kingstone, 1992, Snyder and Kingstone, 2001 for demonstrations that spatial attention is allocated to a signal to

Participants

Fifty participants (mean age 20.3 yrs; 32 females) at the University of British Columbia participated for course credit. Participants were assigned randomly to one of five groups (N=10): a baseline group that had a cue and target on every trial (BL), two control groups that had no cue either 5 or 25% of the time (NoC5, NoC25), and finally two experimental groups, which had no target after the cue either 5 or 25% of the time (NoT5, NoT25).

Apparatus and stimuli

The stimuli were white figures on a black background,

Results

Data from trials in which both a cue and a target occurred were examined. Mean correct RT as a function of cue validity and SOA are shown for each group in Fig. 1. Anticipations (<100 ms) and unusually slow responses (>1000 ms) were excluded, accounting for 2.1% of the data. As seen in Fig. 1, the most striking aspect of the data is the elimination of the foreperiod effect in the NoT25 group as evidenced by the lack of any decline in RT as a function of SOA (Fig. 1E). This effect indicates that

Discussion

The IOR effect is thought to reflect reflexive processing because it is normally observed in circumstances utilizing spatially irrelevant peripheral cues. While these cues are assumed to elicit reflexive attentional processes alone, they are typically used volitionally to prepare for when a target may appear. We tested whether the IOR effect depends on this volitional preparation. Eliminating preparation for target onset would indicate whether or not the IOR effect is a byproduct of using a

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