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Inhibition of return and response repetition within and between modalities

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Abstract

Inhibition of return (IOR) refers to slower responding to stimuli at previously occupied spatial locations. IOR has been vigorously studied because of its possible deep involvement with attention mechanisms. Although IOR occurs both within and across modalities in several experimental paradigms for simple stimulus detection tasks, it has sometimes been difficult to demonstrate in perceptual discrimination tasks. In the preferred target–target paradigm, in which responses are made to a series of targets that vary in spatial location, failure to find IOR could possibly result from mixing of spatial IOR with the facilitating effects of stimulus and/or response repetition on discrimination response times. In this paper we report the first demonstration of auditory/auditory and cross-modality IOR in a target–target paradigm using a discrimination task. Our results show that IOR occurs in this task only on trials on which stimuli and responses are not repeated. These findings present a challenge to purely visual accounts of IOR and support the view that IOR arises within a more general, supra-modal mechanism of attention.

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Notes

  1. Terry et al. (1994), rather than assigning a specific response to a specific target as in our study, used a different response paradigm in the experiments to which this conclusion refers. In Experiment 2, participants responded to the side on which either of the targets appeared; in Experiment 3, participants responded to whether a target or nontarget appeared.

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Acknowledgements

This research was supported by a Discovery Grant from the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council (NSERC) of Canada to LMW and an NSERC Predoctoral Graduate Scholarship to DJP. We thank Vivian Pan and Farnaz Barza for research assistance.

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Correspondence to Alexa B. Roggeveen.

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Roggeveen, A.B., Prime, D.J. & Ward, L.M. Inhibition of return and response repetition within and between modalities. Exp Brain Res 167, 86–94 (2005). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00221-005-0010-5

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