Inhibition of return following instructions to remember and forget

2005 ◽  
Vol 58 (4) ◽  
pp. 613-629 ◽  
Author(s):  
Tracy L. Taylor

Inhibition of return (IOR) refers to slowed responding to a target that appears in the same rather than in a different location as a preceding peripheral onset cue. This study examined IOR as a function of whether the peripheral onset cue was a word that participants were directed to remember or forget. Using a modified item-method directed forgetting paradigm, words appeared one at a time to the left or right, followed by a remember or forget instruction. A target dot was then presented either in the same peripheral location as the preceding word or in a different location; participants made a speeded response to localize this target. Confirming compliance with the memory instructions, recall tests that alternated with blocks of IOR trials (Experiment 1) revealed few intrusions of to-be-forgotten words, and a final recognition test (Experiments 1 and 3) revealed more hits for to-be-remembered words than for to-be-forgotten words. Reaction times to the target dot revealed greater magnitude IOR following to-be-forgotten words than following to-be-remembered words (Experiments 1 and 3). Moreover, when compared to baseline IOR values (Experiment 2), it appeared that this difference resulted from a magnification of IOR following forget instructions and a reduction in IOR following remember instructions. These results demonstrate the usefulness of IOR as an index of memorial processes and suggest that attentional orienting may play a role in the remembering and forgetting of words presented in peripheral visual locations.

Author(s):  
Diana Martella ◽  
Andrea Marotta ◽  
Luis J. Fuentes ◽  
Maria Casagrande

In this study, we assessed whether unspecific attention processes signaled by general reaction times (RTs), as well as specific facilitatory (validity or facilitation effect) and inhibitory (inhibition of return, IOR) effects involved in the attentional orienting network, are affected by low vigilance due to both circadian factors and sleep deprivation (SD). Eighteen male participants performed a cuing task in which peripheral cues were nonpredictive about the target location and the cue-target interval varied at three levels: 200 ms, 800 ms, and 1,100 ms. Facilitation with the shortest and IOR with the longest cue-target intervals were observed in the baseline session, thus replicating previous related studies. Under SD condition, RTs were generally slower, indicating a reduction in the participants’ arousal level. The inclusion of a phasic alerting tone in several trials partially compensated for the reduction in tonic alertness, but not with the longest cue-target interval. With regard to orienting, whereas the facilitation effect due to reflexive shifts of attention was preserved with sleep loss, the IOR was not observed. These results suggest that the decrease of vigilance produced by SD affects both the compensatory effects of phasic alerting and the endogenous component involved in disengaging attention from the cued location, a requisite for the IOR effect being observed.


2017 ◽  
Vol 114 (29) ◽  
pp. 7577-7581 ◽  
Author(s):  
William Saban ◽  
Liora Sekely ◽  
Raymond M. Klein ◽  
Shai Gabay

The literature has long emphasized the neocortex’s role in volitional processes. In this work, we examined endogenous orienting in an evolutionarily older species, the archer fish, which lacks neocortex-like cells. We used Posner’s classic endogenous cuing task, in which a centrally presented, spatially informative cue is followed by a target. The fish responded to the target by shooting a stream of water at it. Interestingly, the fish demonstrated a human-like “volitional” facilitation effect: their reaction times to targets that appeared on the side indicated by the precue were faster than their reaction times to targets on the opposite side. The fish also exhibited inhibition of return, an aftermath of orienting that commonly emerges only in reflexive orienting tasks in human participants. We believe that this pattern demonstrates the acquisition of an arbitrary connection between spatial orienting and a nonspatial feature of a centrally presented stimulus in nonprimate species. In the literature on human attention, orienting in response to such contingencies has been strongly associated with volitional control. We discuss the implications of these results for the evolution of orienting, and for the study of volitional processes in all species, including humans.


Vision ◽  
2019 ◽  
Vol 3 (3) ◽  
pp. 40 ◽  
Author(s):  
Alfred Lim ◽  
Vivian Eng ◽  
Caitlyn Osborne ◽  
Steve M. J. Janssen ◽  
Jason Satel

Inhibition of return is characterized by delayed responses to previously attended locations when the cue-target onset asynchrony (CTOA) is long enough. However, when cues are predictive of a target’s location, faster reaction times to cued as compared to uncued targets are normally observed. In this series of experiments investigating saccadic reaction times, we manipulated the cue predictability to 25% (counterpredictive), 50% (nonpredictive), and 75% (predictive) to investigate the interaction between predictive endogenous facilitatory (FCEs) and inhibitory cueing effects (ICEs). Overall, larger ICEs were seen in the counterpredictive condition than in the nonpredictive condition, and no ICE was found in the predictive condition. Based on the hypothesized additivity of FCEs and ICEs, we reasoned that the null ICEs observed in the predictive condition are the result of two opposing mechanisms balancing each other out, and the large ICEs observed with counterpredictive cueing can be attributed to the combination of endogenous facilitation at uncued locations with inhibition at cued locations. Our findings suggest that the endogenous activity contributed by cue predictability can reduce the overall inhibition observed when the mechanisms occur at the same location, or enhance behavioral inhibition when the mechanisms occur at opposite locations.


2015 ◽  
Vol 21 (7) ◽  
pp. 545-557 ◽  
Author(s):  
Bruno Fimm ◽  
Klaus Willmes ◽  
Will Spijkers

AbstractBased on previous studies demonstrating detrimental effects of reduced alertness on attentional orienting our study seeks to examine covert and overt attentional orienting in different arousal states. We hypothesized an attentional asymmetry with increasing reaction times to stimuli presented to the left visual field in a state of maximally reduced arousal. Eleven healthy participants underwent sleep deprivation and were examined repeatedly every 4 hr over 28 hr in total with two tasks measuring covert and overt orienting of attention. Contrary to our hypothesis, a reduction of arousal did not induce any asymmetry of overt orienting. Even in participants with profound and significant attentional asymmetries in covert orienting no substantial reaction time differences between left- and right-sided targets in the overt orienting task could be observed. This result is not in agreement with assumptions of a tight coupling of covert and overt attentional processes. In conclusion, we found differential effects of lowered arousal induced by sleep deprivation on covert and overt orienting of attention. This pattern of results points to a neuronal non-overlap of brain structures subserving these functions and a differential influence of the norepinephrine system on these modes of spatial attention. (JINS, 2015,21, 545–557)


2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Amelie Reynaud ◽  
Mathilda Froesel ◽  
Carole Guedj ◽  
Sameh Ben Hadj Hassen ◽  
Justine Clery ◽  
...  

The role of norepinephrine (NE) in visuo-spatial attention remains poorly understood. Our goal was to identify the attentional processes under the influence of NE and to characterize these influences. We tested the effects of atomoxetine injections (ATX), a NE-reuptake inhibitor that boosts the level of NE in the brain, on seven monkeys performing a saccadic cued task in which cues and distractors were used to manipulate spatial attention. We found that when the cue accurately predicted the location of the upcoming cue in 80% of the trials, ATX consistently improved attentional orienting, as measured from reaction times (RTs). These effects were best accounted for by a faster accumulation rate in the valid trials, rather than by a change in the decision threshold. By contrast, the effect of ATX on alerting and distractor interference was more mitigated. Finally, we also found that, under ATX, RTs to non-cued targets were longer when these were presented separately from cued targets. This suggests that the impact of NE on visuo-spatial attention depends on the context, such that the adaptive changes elicited by the highly informative value of the cues in the most frequent trials were accompanied by a cost in the less frequent trials.


2006 ◽  
Vol 23 (3-4) ◽  
pp. 489-493 ◽  
Author(s):  
LUIZ HENRIQUE M. DO CANTO-PEREIRA ◽  
GALINA V. PARAMEI ◽  
EDGARD MORYA ◽  
RONALD D. RANVAUD

Inhibitory effects have been reported when a target is preceded by a cue of the same color and location. Color-based inhibition was found using red and blue nonisoluminant stimuli (Law et al., 1995). Here we investigate whether this phenomenon depends on the chromatic subsystem involved by employing isoluminant colors varying along either the violet-yellow or purple-turquoise cardinal axis. Experiment 1 replicated Law et al.'s study: After fixating magenta, either a red or blue cue was presented, followed by a magenta “neutral attractor,” and, finally, by a red or blue target. In Experiment 2, violet and yellow, cue or target, varied along a tritan confusion line in the CIE 1976 chromaticity diagram. In Experiment 3, purple and turquoise, cue or target, varied along a deutan confusion line in the CIE 1976 chromaticity diagram. Normal trichromats (n = 19) participated in all three experiments. In Experiment 1, color repetition indeed resulted in longer reaction times (RTs) (4.7 ms, P = 0.038). In Experiment 2, however, no significant color repetition effect was found; RTs to violet and yellow were not significantly different, though tending toward slower responses (2 ms) for violet repetition but faster (5 ms) for yellow. Experiment 3 also showed no color repetition effect (P = 0.58); notably, RTs were overall faster for purple than for turquoise (22 ms, P < 0.0001). Furthermore, responses tended to be slower for purple repetition (4 ms, P > 0.05), but faster for turquoise (7 ms, P > 0.05). These findings demonstrate that color repetition is not always inhibitory but may turn facilitatory depending on the colors employed. The results indicate that disengagement of attention is an unlikely mechanism to be the sole explanation of previously reported color-based inhibition of return. We suggest a complementary, perceptual explanation: response (dis)advantage depends on whether the stimuli are isoluminant and on the opponent chromatic subsystem involved. The choice of the colors employed and the cue-attractor-target constellation also may be of significance.


2002 ◽  
Vol 14 (8) ◽  
pp. 1256-1263 ◽  
Author(s):  
Michael C. Dorris ◽  
Raymond M. Klein ◽  
Stefan Everling ◽  
Douglas P. Munoz

The phenomenon of inhibition of return (IOR) has generated considerable interest in cognitive neuroscience because of its putative functional role in visual search, that of placing inhibitory tags on objects that have been recently inspected so as to direct further search to novel items. Many behavioral parameters of this phenomenon have been clearly delineated, and based on indirect but converging evidence, the widely held consensus is that the midbrain superior colliculus (SC) is involved in the generation of IOR. We had previously trained monkeys on a saccadic IOR task and showed that they displayed IOR in a manner similar to that observed in humans. Here we recorded the activity of single neurons in the superficial and intermediate layers of the SC while the monkeys performed this IOR task. We found that when the target was presented at a previously cued location, the stimulus-related response was attenuated and the magnitude of this response was correlated with subsequent saccadic reaction times. Surprisingly, this observed attenuation of activity during IOR was not caused by active inhibition of these neurons because (a) they were, in fact, more active following the presentation of the cue in their response field, and (b) when we repeated the same experiment while using the saccadic response time induced by electrical micro-stimulation of the SC to judge the level of excitability of the SC circuitry during the IOR task, we found faster saccades were elicited from the cued location. Our findings demonstrate that the primate SC participates in the expression of IOR; however, the SC is not the site of the inhibition. Instead, the reduced activity in the SC reflects a signal reduction that has taken place upstream.


2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Lorenzo Diana ◽  
Patrick Pilastro ◽  
Edoardo N. Aiello ◽  
Aleksandra K. Eberhard-Moscicka ◽  
René M. Müri ◽  
...  

ABSTRACTIn the present work, we applied anodal transcranial direct current stimulation (tDCS) over the posterior parietal cortex (PPC) and frontal eye field (FEF) of the right hemisphere in healthy subjects to modulate attentional orienting and disengagement in a gap-overlap task. Both stimulations led to bilateral improvements in saccadic reaction times (SRTs), with larger effects for gap trials. However, analyses showed that the gap effect was not affected by tDCS. Importantly, we observed significant effects of baseline performance that may mediate side- and task-specific effects of brain stimulation.


Perception ◽  
1996 ◽  
Vol 25 (1_suppl) ◽  
pp. 175-175
Author(s):  
K Watanabe ◽  
S Shimojo

When a cue and a target are successively presented at the same location, reaction times to discriminate the location of the target are longer than when they are at different locations (inhibition of return: IOR). We found that visual awareness of the cue was not necessary for IOR to occur. Both eyes dichoptically viewed 9 × 9 scattered arrays of vertical or horizontal line segments. To avoid effects of eye dominance and binocular rivalry, cue displays were presented briefly (33, 50, or 200 ms). Three types of cue displays were randomised: (i) no cue: horizontal segments for the left (right) eye and vertical segments for the right (left) eye; subjects perceived scattered binocularly-combined crosses, (ii) binocular (fusible) cue: displays for both eyes had cue elements (a horizontal or vertical segment popping out among orthogonal background segments) and identical interocularly; subjects easily perceived the cue; (iii) dichoptic cue: displays for both eyes had cues at the same location, but all the segments were interocularly orthogonal. Here, because of the brief presentation that horizontal and vertical segments were just combined binocularly, and subjects could see only scattered crosses. Thus, they could not be aware of the cue, which exists at the monocular level. After the cue display disappeared, the target displays [same as the cue display in (ii), but with an independent location of the pop-out target] were presented (ISI=400, 800, or 1200 ms). Reaction time to discriminate location of the target was measured for three subjects who fixated on a fixation point. In our results, IOR took place in conditions (ii) and (iii). This suggests that localisation of the cue occurs without visual awareness, which then leads to IOR.


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