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Investigating a two causes theory of inhibition of return

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Abstract

It has recently been demonstrated that there are independent sensory and motor mechanisms underlying inhibition of return (IOR) when measured with oculomotor responses (Wang et al. in Exp Brain Res 218:441–453, 2012). However, these results are seemingly in conflict with previous empirical results which led to the proposal that there are two mutually exclusive flavors of IOR (Taylor and Klein in J Exp Psychol Hum Percept Perform 26:1639–1656, 2000). The observed differences in empirical results across these studies and the theoretical frameworks that were proposed based on the results are likely due to differences in the experimental designs. The current experiments establish that the existence of additive sensory and motor contributions to IOR do not depend on target type, repeated spatiotopic stimulation, attentional control settings, or a temporal gap between fixation offset and cue onset, when measured with saccadic responses. Furthermore, our experiments show that the motor mechanism proposed by Wang et al. in Exp Brain Res 218:441–453, (2012) is likely restricted to the oculomotor system, since the additivity effect does not carry over into the manual response modality.

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Notes

  1. Although in the M task the arrows (cue, cue back, and target) were all presented at fixation (repeated stimulation) and should thus also have evoked the sensory mechanism, this repeated stimulation is equated across cued and uncued trials and so does not contribute to the final IOR score.

  2. An ANOVA was performed on the IOR scores, with the variables experiment (Experiment 1 vs. Experiment 2) and task (S, M′, or SM). The main effect of experiment did not reach significance (F(1, 34) = 0.1, p = 0.75, μ 2 G  = 0.00), suggesting that the overall magnitude of IOR effects did not differ across the two experiments. The main effect of task did reach significance (F(2, 68) = 4.46, p < 0.05, μ 2 G  = 0.05) but the interaction between task and experiment did not reach significance (F(2, 68) = 1.25, p = 0.29, μ 2 G  = 0.02), suggesting that the overall pattern of results did not differ across the two experiments. However, separate ANOVAs performed for each experiment revealed a large effect of task for Experiment 1 (F(2, 22) = 7.82, p < 0.01, μ 2 G  = 0.22) and a small effect for Experiment 2 (F(2, 46) = 1.18, p = 0.32, μ 2 G  = 0.02), suggesting that, although we cannot assert so statistically, the difference in the pattern of results between Experiment 1 and Experiment 2 is likely a qualitative one.

  3. Due to a programming lapse, in Experiments 3 and 4, the cue duration (and the overall CTOA) were extended on trials in which eye movements in response to cues occurred within 300 ms (29.2 % in Experiment 3 and 47.5 % in Experiment 4). As a result, in Experiment 3, the mean cue duration was 477 ms (mean CTOA = 1,625 ms) and 316 ms (mean CTOA = 1,513 ms) for exogenous and endogenous cue trials, respectively. In Experiment 4, the mean cue duration was 446 ms (mean CTOA = 1,648 ms) and 339 ms (mean CTOA = 1,542 ms) for exogenous and endogenous cue trials, respectively. We still report these two experiments because: (a) as will be shown in the Results sections, the SM task produced larger IOR effects despite the fact that the CTOA was longer in this task. The two causes theory of IOR predicts that the contribution of both the sensory and motor mechanisms to behavioral IOR decays with time. Consequently, the IOR effects in the SM tasks were slightly underestimated in Experiments 3 and 4. Nonetheless, IOR effects in the SM tasks were still larger than those for the M′ tasks in both experiments. (b) The pattern of results was essentially the same (i.e., stronger IOR for the SM task) in Experiment 3 when only trials not affected by the programming lapse were analyzed. IOR scores for the M′ and SM task were 19 ms and 44 ms in Experiment 3 (t(7) = 3.45, p < 0.05). In Experiment 4, only four participants produced enough normal trials (at least 6 trials per experimental cell) for such an analysis. The IOR effect for the SM task (60 ms) was still larger than that for the M′ task (31 ms) (t(4) = 2.95, p = 0.06) under these conditions.

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Acknowledgments

This research was supported by Raymond M. Klein’s NSERC Discovery grant. We would like to thank Matthew D. Hilchey for continuing to challenge our interpretations and for helping us to design appropriate paradigms to continue testing our theoretical framework for IOR.

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  1. Faculty of Computer Science, Dalhousie University, Halifax, Canada

    Jason Satel

  2. Department of Cognitive Psychology, Vrije Universiteit, Amsterdam, The Netherlands

    Zhiguo Wang

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  1. Jason Satel
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  2. Zhiguo Wang
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Correspondence to Jason Satel.

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Satel, J., Wang, Z. Investigating a two causes theory of inhibition of return. Exp Brain Res 223, 469–478 (2012). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00221-012-3274-6

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