Abstract
Previous research has shown that presentation of a peripheral, irrelevant visual stimulus initially attracts attention to that location. However, following this initial reflexive capture of attention, attention is then biased away from that location—a phenomenon termed inhibition of return (IOR). Researchers debate the extent to which motor conflict contributes to the IOR effect. To further explore this question, we conducted an experiment employing different cue-target tasks and examined their effect on IOR. Participants were assigned to three conditions differing in response instructions. A Target-Only condition replicated the classic IOR procedure such that no responses were provided to the cues. A Same-Response condition required participants to make identical responses to the cue and target. A Different-Response condition required participants to provide different responses to the cue and target. In this experiment, we found that motor conflict contributed to IOR, but could not entirely account for it. In a second experiment, we increased the perceptual similarity of the cues and targets and found that in this situation the contribution of motor conflict to IOR increased.
Meeting abstract presented at VSS 2012