Auditory frequency-based inhibition differs from spatial IOR

Attention, Perception, & Psychophysics, Jul 2002

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.

A PDF file should load here. If you do not see its contents the file may be temporarily unavailable at the journal website or you do not have a PDF plug-in installed and enabled in your browser.

Alternatively, you can download the file locally and open with any standalone PDF reader:

https://link.springer.com/content/pdf/10.3758%2FBF03194744.pdf

Auditory frequency-based inhibition differs from spatial IOR

DAVID J. PRIME 0 LAWRENCE M. WARD 0 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. - 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)


This is a preview of a remote PDF: https://link.springer.com/content/pdf/10.3758%2FBF03194744.pdf

David J. Prime, Lawrence M. Ward. Auditory frequency-based inhibition differs from spatial IOR, Attention, Perception, & Psychophysics, 2002, pp. 771-784, Volume 64, Issue 5, DOI: 10.3758/BF03194744