Abstract
Recent studies eliminated volitional temporal preparation in single location inhibition of return (IOR) studies, but reported conflicting results regarding the contribution of volitional attention on single location IOR in detection tasks. We used a multiple location IOR paradigm to examine the contribution of voluntary attention to the typically observed finding of the greatest magnitude of IOR at the most recently cued location following multiple cues. A non-ageing foreperiod was used to eliminate volitional temporal preparation. When subjects were informed of the probability of a trial type (50% after cue 1, 25% after cue 2, and 12.5% after cue 3), typical results were observed with IOR largest at the most recently cued location and smaller for less recently cued locations on 3-cue trials. However, when subjects were informed of the frequency of a trial type (i.e., on 50 of the 100 trials, the target will appear after cue 1 etc), the results showed that IOR was equivalent at all cued locations, suggesting that IOR is fundamentally a reflexive event that can be modulated by volitional attention. (Manuscript in preparation)
Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada.