Abstract
When a target appears in the same peripheral location as a previous cue, responding is typically delayed if the cue–target interval is relatively long. This phenomenon is termed inhibition of return (IOR) and has been suggested to reflect an attentional bias in favour of novel visual space. It has been demonstrated recently that IOR is much stronger in the far periphery than in the perifoveal visual field. The present study further investigated the neural mechanisms underlying this eccentricity effect of IOR with an event-related fMRI technique. The results demonstrated a stronger activation in visual cortex for perifoveal processing and a broader activation in multiple brain areas for peripheral processing. When IOR effects were compared between these two areas, a stronger activation of the fronto-parietal network was evidenced for perifoveal versus peripheral IOR, while the prefrontal cortex was more strongly involved in the peripheral IOR versus perifoveal IOR. These results suggest that different neural mechanisms are mediating the dissociable inhibitory functions between the perifoveal and peripheral visual field.
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Acknowledgments
This research was supported by grants from the national Natural Science Foundation of China (No. 30670703 and No. 91120004).
Conflict of interest
This supplement was not sponsored by outside commercial interests. It was funded entirely by ECONA, Via dei Marsi, 78, 00185 Roma, Italy.
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Lei, Q., Bao, Y., Wang, B. et al. fMRI correlates of inhibition of return in perifoveal and peripheral visual field. Cogn Process 13 (Suppl 1), 223–227 (2012). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10339-012-0487-3
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10339-012-0487-3