DAVID J. PRIME
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LAWRENCE M. WARD
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0
University of British Columbia
,
Vancouver
,
British Columbia
,
Canada
Uninformative auditory frequency cues have a facilitatory effect on reaction time and accuracy of detection and intensity discrimination of target tones for cue-target intervals of up to 3 sec (Green & McKeown, 2001; Ward, 1997). Under some conditions, however, this facilitatory effect can reverse to an inhibitory effect at cue-target intervals longer than 450 msec (Mondor, Breau, & Milliken, 1998). The present work demonstrates that such inhibitory effects are not found in target-target experiments (Experiment 1) or in cue-target experiments requiring a go-no-go discrimination of the target (Experiment 2), whereas they do appear in the paradigm used by Mondor et al. (1998, Experiment 3), albeit unaffected by the similarity of cue and target. Thus, the frequency-based inhibitory effects sometimes found in auditory cuing tasks can be distinguished empirically from those characterizing spatial inhibition of return (IOR), which are found in both target-target and go-no-go cue-target paradigms. The present work and functional and neurophysiological arguments all support the position that different mechanisms underlie spatial IOR and the inhibitory effects sometimes found in auditory frequency processing.
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In spatial location cuing studies, it has been found that
uninformative stimulus cues can have different effects on
response latencies at different cuetarget intervals. For
relatively short cuetarget intervals (<300 msec), subjects
respond more rapidly on valid-cue trials than on invalid-cue
trials. This facilitatory effect has been attributed to an
automatic (exogenous) covert orienting of attention to the cued
location that results in more efficient processing of the
target (for a review, see Wright & Ward, 1998). In some
cases, this facilitation at shorter cuetarget intervals is
accompanied in the same experiment by an inhibitory effect
at longer cuetarget intervals in which subjects respond
more slowly on valid-cue trials than on invalid-cue trials.
This latter effect is called inhibition of return (IOR).
IOR was first observed in visual spatial orienting by
Posner and Cohen (1984). In their study, IOR occurred when
attention was oriented exogenously by a direct cue, but not
when attention was oriented endogenously (voluntarily) in
response to a symbolic cue. They also found that IOR
occurred with both covert shifts of attention and overt eye
movements. Further research has revealed many other
properties of visual IOR. The inhibitory effect has been found
to last for several seconds after cue onset (Tassinari &
Berlucchi, 1995) and to affect simple detection responses
This research was supported by a Natural Sciences and Engineering
Research Council of Canada (NSERC) operating grant to L.M.W. and
by a NSERC Predoctoral Research Fellowship to D.J.P. We thank Matt
Tata and Christian Richard for valuable discussions. We also thank Ray
Klein, Charles Spence, and an anonymous reviewer for helpful
comments on an earlier version of this paper. Correspondence concerning
this article should be addressed to D. J. Prime or L. M. Ward,
Department of Psychology, University of British Columbia, 2136 West Mall,
Vancouver, BC, V6T 1Z4 Canada (e-mail:
or
[email protected]. ubc.ca).
(e.g., Posner & Cohen, 1984), localization responses (e.g.,
Maylor, 1985), and nonspatial discrimination responses
(e.g., Pratt, 1995; Pratt, Kingstone, & Khoe, 1997). Like
attention, IOR has been shown to affect target detection
accuracy (Handy, Jha, & Mangun, 1999) and short-latency
ERP components (McDonald, Ward, & Kiehl, 1999). IOR
has been associated with the oculomotor system. Rafal,
Calabresi, Brennen, and Sciolto (1989) showed that an
endogenously prepared saccade can produce IOR even if the
saccade is not executed. In addition to its effect on manual
responses, IOR can affect the direction (Posner, Rafal,
Choate, & Vaughan, 1985) and latency (Abrams &
Dobkin, 1994) of saccadic eye movements.
IOR is not an exclusively visual phenomenon.It has been
observed in other spatial modalities, including hearing
(e.g., McDonald & Ward, 1999; Reuter-Lorenz &
Rosenquist, 1996; Schmidt, 1996) and touch (e.g., Tassinari &
Campara, 1996). In addition to these within-modality
effects, IOR has also been found in cross-modal studies in
which the cues and the targets are presented in different
sensory modalities (e.g., McDonald & Ward, 2002; Spence
& Driver, 1998a). The ubiquitous nature of IOR across
many tasks and sensory modalities indicates that the
processes underlying IOR are important and general
mechanisms in the spatial selection of information.
When Posner et al. (1985) coined the label inhibition of
return they were naming the empirically observed
phenomenon after their theoretical explanation. Posner et al.
(1985) explained the opposite cue effects found at shorter
and longer cuetarget intervals by assuming that the cue
causes (...truncated)