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Evidence for an attentional component in saccadic inhibition of return

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An Erratum to this article was published on 27 June 2009

Abstract

After presentation of a peripheral cue, facilitation at the cued location is followed by inhibition of return (IOR). It has been recently proposed that IOR may originate at different processing stages for manual and ocular responses, with manual IOR resulting from inhibited attentional orienting, and ocular IOR resulting form inhibited motor preparation. Contrary to this interpretation, we found an effect of target contrast on saccadic IOR. The effect of contrast decreased with increasing reaction times (RTs) for saccades, but not for manual key-press responses. This may have masked the effect of contrast on IOR with saccades in previous studies (Hunt and Kingstone in J Exp Psychol Hum Percept Perform 29:1068–1074, 2003) because only mean RTs were considered. We also found that background luminance strongly influenced the effects of gap and target contrast on IOR.

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Notes

  1. To avoid ambiguities, we mostly refer to target luminance relative to background luminance (i.e., target contrast) instead of absolute luminance.

  2. The SIMPLEX algorithm (MATLAB® function fminsearch, with default parameters) was used to find the best fitting ex-Gaussian cumulative distribution that minimized the squared sum of the residuals. The ex-Gaussian distribution is widely used as it usually offers a good fit of reaction times data (Heathcote et al. 1991; Luce 1991).

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Acknowledgments

We would like to thank Caroline Dunand for running the experiments, Jillian Fecteau, Daniel T. Smith, Casimir Ludwig, Rosanne van Diepen, and especially two anonymous reviewers for their comments. D.K. and D.S. were supported by grant PDFM1-114417 from the Swiss National Science Foundation.

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  1. Faculté de Psychologie et Sciences de l’Éducation, Université de Genève, 40 bd du Pont d’Arve, 1205, Geneva, Switzerland

    David Souto & Dirk Kerzel

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  1. David Souto
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  2. Dirk Kerzel
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Correspondence to David Souto.

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An erratum to this article can be found at http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/s00221-009-1911-5

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Souto, D., Kerzel, D. Evidence for an attentional component in saccadic inhibition of return. Exp Brain Res 195, 531–540 (2009). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00221-009-1824-3

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