Independent effects of endogenous and exogenous spatial cueing: inhibition of return at endogenously attended target locations

In experiments examining inhibition of return (IOR), an attentional effect that inhibits the returning of attention to a previously attended location or object, a second cue during the stimulus onset asynchrony (SOA) period is typically used. This is done to control the reorienting of attention from a peripherally cued location back to the central fixation point before the target appears. Recently, there have been numerous studies which demonstrate that fixation cues are effective in revealing IOR. Plenty of factors have been shown to influence the effects of the fixation cue in IOR, including the time onset of the fixation cue, the number of potential target locations, the attentional demands of performing the task, the modality of the fixation cue, and the condition of participants. Here, the authors review previous work that has examined the effects of the fixation cue in IOR.

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Placeholders dissociate two forms of inhibition of return

Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology ◽

10.1080/17470218.2016.1247898 ◽

2018 ◽

Vol 71 (2) ◽

pp. 360-371 ◽

Cited By ~ 6

Author(s):

Matthew D. Hilchey ◽

Jay Pratt ◽

John Christie

Keyword(s):

Eye Movements ◽

Inhibition Of Return ◽

Perception And Action ◽

Manual Response ◽

Spatial Cueing ◽

Oculomotor Activity ◽

Response Target

Decades of research using Posner’s classic spatial cueing paradigm has uncovered at least two forms of inhibition of return (IOR) in the aftermath of an exogenous, peripheral orienting cue. One prominent dissociation concerns the role of covert and overt orienting in generating IOR effects that relate to perception- and action-oriented processes, respectively. Another prominent dissociation concerns the role of covert and overt orienting in generating IOR effects that depend on object- and space-based representation, respectively. Our objective was to evaluate whether these dichotomies are functionally equivalent by manipulating placeholder object presence in the cueing paradigm. By discouraging eye movements throughout, Experiments 1A and 1B validated a perception-oriented form of IOR that depended critically on placeholders. Experiment 2A demonstrated that IOR was robust without placeholders when eye movements went to the cue and back to fixation before the manual response target. In Experiment 2B, we replicated Experiment 2A’s procedures except we discouraged eye movements. IOR was observed, albeit only weakly and significantly diminished relative to when eye movements were involved. We conclude that action-oriented IOR is robust against placeholders but that the magnitude of perception-oriented IOR is critically sensitive to placeholder presence when unwanted oculomotor activity can be ruled out.

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What is causing “inhibition of return” in spatial cueing tasks? Temporally disentangling multiple cue-triggered effects on multiple time scales using response history and conditional accuracy analyses.

10.31234/osf.io/udpvs ◽

2020 ◽

Author(s):

Sven Panis ◽

Thomas Schmidt

Keyword(s):

Working Memory ◽

Inhibition Of Return ◽

Spatial Working Memory ◽

Direct Result ◽

Multiple Time Scales ◽

Multiple Time ◽

Target Onset ◽

Channel Activation ◽

Spatial Cueing ◽

Response Channel

Research on spatial cueing has shown that uninformative cues often facilitate mean response time (RT) performance in valid- compared to invalid-cueing conditions at short cue-target stimulus-onset-asynchronies (SOAs), and robustly generate a reversed or inhibitory cueing effect at longer SOAs that is widely known as inhibition-of-return (IOR). To study the within-trial time course of IOR we employ discrete-time hazard and conditional accuracy analyses to describe and model the shapes of the RT and accuracy distributions measured in two experimental tasks. In contrast to the mean performance measures, our distributional analyses show that (a) the uninformative cue generates response channel activation, (b) which continues during the cue-target interval so that the cue location must be stored in spatial working memory, (c) the premature cue-triggered response is selectively inhibited before target onset, (d) the IOR effect (valid versus invalid cueing) emerges around 160 ms after target onset in the hazard functions when cue-target SOA exceeds ~200 ms, quickly increases and decreases in size, and is gone within 120 ms, (e) the inhibitory component does not diminish over the course of the experiment, and (f) the location of an additional central cue relative to the current focus of spatial attention can generate response channel activation as well. These distributional data show that mean performance patterns conceal crucial information about behavioral dynamics, and suggest that sensory IOR is the direct result of encoding the cue location in spatial working memory to promote change detection, instead of attention leaving an inhibitory tag to promote visual search.

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Probability manipulations can modulate but not reverse reflective inhibition-of-return effects

10.31234/osf.io/cs5q3 ◽

2021 ◽

Author(s):

Zachary Jay Cole ◽

Evan Nathaniel Lintz ◽

Matthew Johnson

Keyword(s):

Significant Role ◽

Inhibition Of Return ◽

Response Times ◽

Inhibitory Influence ◽

Directed Attention ◽

Attentional Processes ◽

Perceptual Attention ◽

Paradoxical Effects ◽

Target Locations

Inhibition of return (IOR) is a phenomenon of perceptual attention characterized by delayed shifts in attention toward previously cued target locations. In reflective (internally directed) attention studies, response times (RTs) to cued items are sometimes facilitated, but other times IOR-like effects are observed wherein RTs to probed items are slower when the items had been mentally attended (refreshed) earlier in the trial. Perceptual IOR is known to be modulated by the probability that target and cued locations match. If the same is true for reflective attention, it could account for why sometimes reflective attention can lead to facilitation and other times inhibition. In the current study, four experiments examined the potential facilitative or inhibitory influence of probe predictability in reflective attention. We first replicated the design and IOR like pattern of results originally reported by Johnson et al. (2013). In subsequent experiments, when the proportion of unrefreshed probes was increased, the IOR-like effect increased in magnitude. When the proportion of refreshed probes was increased, the IOR-like effect was eliminated, but there was no evidence for facilitation. Altogether, these results are consistent with perceptual IOR literature implicating underlying inhibitory and facilitative attentional processes that can either interact synergistically or nullify each other. Further work will be needed to fully understand the paradoxical effects of why reflective attention is sometimes inhibitory and other times facilitative, but the current results demonstrate that expectation can play a significant role in the size of the effect.

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Vertical asymmetries and inhibition of return: Effects of spatial and non-spatial cueing on behavior and visual ERPs

International Journal of Psychophysiology ◽

10.1016/j.ijpsycho.2013.12.004 ◽

2014 ◽

Vol 91 (2) ◽

pp. 121-131 ◽

Cited By ~ 8

Author(s):

Francisco-Javier Gutiérrez-Domínguez ◽

Paula Pazo-Álvarez ◽

Sonia Doallo ◽

Luis J. Fuentes ◽

Laura Lorenzo-López ◽

...

Keyword(s):

Inhibition Of Return ◽

Spatial Cueing

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Inhibition of Return Impairs Phosphene Detection

Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience ◽

10.1162/jocn_a_00276 ◽

2012 ◽

Vol 24 (11) ◽

pp. 2262-2267 ◽

Cited By ~ 4

Author(s):

Daniel T. Smith ◽

Keira Ball ◽

Amanda Ellison

Keyword(s):

Visual Cortex ◽

Spatial Attention ◽

Inhibition Of Return ◽

Visual Exploration ◽

Extrastriate Cortex ◽

Neural Signals ◽

Extrastriate Visual Cortex ◽

Visual Areas ◽

Target Locations ◽

Site Of Stimulation

Efficient visual exploration requires the ability to select possible target locations via spatial attention and to deselect previously inspected locations via inhibition of return (IOR). Although a great deal is known about the effects of spatial attention on processing in visual cortex, much less is known about the effects of IOR on early visual areas. One possibility is that IOR acts in an opposite way to spatial attention, such that, whereas spatial attention enhances target related neural signals in visual cortex, IOR suppress target-related signals. Using a novel dual-coil TMS protocol, we found that IOR reduced the probability of detecting a TMS-induced phosphene in extrastriate cortex (V5). Specifically, a nonpredictive spatial precue presented 500 or 800 msec before stimulation significantly reduced the probability of detecting a phosphene when the precue appeared contralaterally to the site of stimulation (i.e., ipsilaterally to the potential location of the phosphene), compared with ipsilaterally or centrally presented cues. This result demonstrates that IOR facilitates visual exploration by directly affecting the strength of target-related signals in extrastriate visual cortex. This result is consistent with neurophysiological models of attention, which postulate that IOR modulates perception by biasing competition between sensory representations.

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