Abstract
Castel and colleagues (Percept Psychophys 65(6):970–981, 2003) proposed that visuospatial working memory is needed to retain and update the irrelevant but attended location in an inhibition of return (IOR) procedure. In a series of three experiments, we re-examined this hypothesis by loading visuospatial working memory and manipulating the timing of encoding. When the visuospatial memory items were presented right after the cue, as in Castel et al. (Percept Psychophys 65(6):970–981, 2003), we replicated the lack of IOR in the dual-task condition (Experiment 1). However, when we presented the visuospatial memory items before the spatial cue, to control for retroactive interference in encoding, we found robust IOR effects (Experiment 2); the effect remained strong even when participants were prevented from using verbal labels to rehearse the memory material (Experiment 3). We conclude that IOR does not seem to depend on retaining the position of the irrelevant cue in visuospatial working memory.
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Notes
We would like to thank Dr R. Logie for this suggestion.
We would like to thank Dr R. Logie for pointing out this limitation.
Notice that the interval between the cue and the first memory object in Experiment 1a and in Castel et al.’s study (2003) was zero.
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Acknowledgments
We would like to thank Georgia Liontou for the assistance in collecting data. Also, we are grateful to Dr Robert Logie, Dr Juan Lupiañez and Dr Bernhard Hommel for their comments on previous versions of this manuscript.
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Vivas, A.B., Liaromati, I., Masoura, E. et al. Re-examining the contribution of visuospatial working memory to inhibition of return. Psychological Research 74, 524–531 (2010). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00426-010-0274-7
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s00426-010-0274-7