Cue repetition increases inhibition of return

doi:10.1016/j.neulet.2008.10.063

Neuroscience Letters

Volume 448, Issue 3, 31 December 2008, Pages 231-235

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.neulet.2008.10.063 Get rights and content

Abstract

Inhibition of return (IOR) refers to slowed responses to targets presented at the same location as a preceding stimulus. We explored whether the IOR effect would increase with the number of cues preceding the target (a ‘cue’). Subjects performed a Posner cueing task with 1–5 cue presentations prior to the target, to which they made either a manual localization (Experiment 1) or target discrimination response (Experiment 2). The cues could be the same as (Experiment 1), or differ in shape from (Experiment 2), the target. The results showed that regardless of cue-target congruency the IOR effect increased dramatically with the number of preceding cues. This increase was driven mostly by a linear slowing of reaction times to targets presented on the same side as the cue(s), suggesting that a process such as sensory adaptation and/or habituation may be a contributing mechanism to the IOR effect.

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Acknowledgements

We thank Ray Klein and two anonymous reviewers for comments on earlier drafts of this manuscript, Doug Munoz for support of author SB, and NSERC and Killam scholarships to author KD.

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Cited by (24)

The Spatial Orienting paradigm: How to design and interpret spatial attention experiments
2014, Neuroscience and Biobehavioral Reviews
Citation Excerpt :
Furthermore, IOR has also been proved independent of some forms of exogenous orienting, such as gaze cueing (Martín-Arévalo et al., 2013b). These results have challenged the “re-orienting” hypothesis, and other perceptual and motoric mechanisms have been proposed to underlie the IOR effect (Berlucchi, 2006; Chica and Lupiáñez, 2009; Chica et al., 2006, 2010b; Dukewich, 2009; Dukewich and Boehnke, 2008; Gabay et al., 2012; Lupiáñez, 2010; Lupiáñez et al., 2013; Martín-Arévalo et al., 2013a; Taylor and Klein, 2000). Many results indicate that IOR is not due to the inhibition of the return of attention to the previously attended location, but it might be due to a reluctance to respond to a location where we have previously responded (motor hypothesis), or to a habituation of attentional capture or a detection cost in coding a new object presented in a previously stimulated location (perceptual–attentional hypothesis).
This paper is conceived as a guide that will describe the very well known Spatial Orienting paradigm, used to explore attentional processes in healthy individuals as well as in people suffering from psychiatric disorders and brain-damaged patients. The paradigm was developed in the late 1970s, and since then, it has been used in thousands of attentional studies. In this review, we attempt to describe, the paradigm for the naïf reader, and explain in detail when is it used, which variables are usually manipulated, how to interpret its results, and how can it be adapted to different populations and methodologies. The main goal of this review is to provide a practical guide to researchers who have never used the paradigm that will help them design their experiments, as a function of their theoretical and experimental needs. We also focus on how to adapt the paradigm to different technologies (such as event-related potentials, functional resonance imaging, or transcranial magnetic stimulation), and to different populations by presenting an example of its use in brain-damaged patients.
Modeling inhibition of return as short-term depression of early sensory input to the superior colliculus
2011, Vision Research
Citation Excerpt :
However, it is possible that an asymptote is reached and that subsequent stimulations do not have an additive effect, or that multiple stimulations interact in an unexpected way. Using manual responses, Dukewich and Boehnke (2008) tested this prediction with positive results. Further behavioral and neurophysiological investigations should be undertaken to elucidate this issue.
Inhibition of return (IOR) is an orienting phenomenon characterized by slower behavioral responses to spatially cued, relative to uncued targets, when the cue-target onset asynchronies (CTOAs) are long enough that cue-elicited attentional capture has dispersed. Here, we implement a short-term depression (STD) account of IOR within a neuroscientifically based dynamic neural field model (DNF) of the superior colliculus (SC). In addition to the prototypical findings in the cue-target paradigm (i.e., the biphasic pattern of behavioral enhancement at short CTOAs and behavioral costs at long CTOAs), a variety of findings in the literature are generated with this model, including IOR in averaging saccades and the co-existence of IOR and endogenous orienting at the same location. Many findings that cannot be accommodated by this model could be accounted for by incorporating cortical contributions.
Spatial working memory load impairs manual but not saccadic inhibition of return
2011, Vision Research
Citation Excerpt :
Those properties make it a possible candidate in saccadic IOR to hold the inhibitory tagging. The third possibility may be that saccadic IOR just reflects a simple low-level visual neural habituation (Dukewich & Boehnke, 2008; see a review in Dukewich, 2009) or a mechanism analogous to refractory periods after intense neural activity (Hooge et al., 2005) rather than a memory-based effect. Further studies may rest on the combination of the implicit memory and the IOR task to examine these possibilities.
Although spatial working memory has been shown to play a central role in manual IOR (Castel, Pratt, & Craik, 2003), it is so far unclear whether spatial working memory is involved in saccadic IOR. The present study sought to address this question by using a dual task paradigm, in which the participants performed an IOR task while keeping a set of locations in spatial working memory. While manual IOR was eliminated, saccadic IOR was not affected by spatial working memory load. These findings suggest that saccadic IOR does not rely on spatial working memory to process inhibitory tagging.
Target-to-Target Repetition Cost and Location Negative Priming Are Dissociable: Evidence for Different Mechanisms
2011, Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception and Performance
Detection cost: A nonnegligible factor contributing to inhibition of return in the discrimination task under the cue–target paradigm
2023, Perception
Habituation (of Attentional Capture) Is Not What You Think It Is
2023, Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception and Performance

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View full text

Cue repetition increases inhibition of return

Abstract

Section snippets

Acknowledgements

Vision Res.

Cogn. Psychol.

Trends Cogn. Sci.

Neuropsychologia

Oculocentric coding of inhibited eye movements to recently attended locations

J. Exp. Psychol. Human

Using auditory and visual stimuli to investigate the behavioral and neuronal consequences of reflexive covert orienting

J. Neurophysiol.

Inhibition of return: a phenomenon in search of a mechanism and a better name

Cogn. Neuropsychol.

Contribution of the primate superior colliculus to inhibition of return

J. Cogn. Neurosci.

Neural correlates of the automatic and goal-driven biases in orienting spatial attention

J. Neurophysiol.

Correlates of capture of attention and inhibition of return across stages of visual processing

J. Cogn. Neurosci.