Oculomotor inhibition of return: Evidence against object-centered representation

ABSTRACT

Intermixing central, directional arrow targets with the peripheral targets typically used in the Posnerian spatial cueing paradigm offers a useful diagnostic for ascertaining the relative contributions of output and input processes to oculomotor inhibition of return (IOR). Here, we use this diagnostic to determine whether object-based oculomotor IOR comprises output and/or input processes. One of two placeholder objects in peripheral vision was cued, then both objects rotated smoothly either 90 or 180 degrees around the circumference of an imaginary circle. After this movement, a saccade was made to the location marked by a peripheral onset target or indicated by the central arrow. In our first three experiments, whereas there was evidence for IOR when measured by central arrow or peripheral onset targets at cued locations, there was little trace of IOR at the cued object. We thereafter precisely replicated the seminal experiment for object-based oculomotor IOR (Abrams, R. A., & Dobkin, R. S. (1994). Inhibition of return: Effects of attentional cuing on eye movement latencies. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception and Performance, 20(3), 467–477; Experiment 4) but again found little evidence of an object-based IOR effect. Finally, we ran a paradigm with only peripheral targets and with motion and stationary trials randomly intermixed. Here we again showed IOR at the cued location but not at the cued object. Together, the findings suggest that object-based representation of oculomotor IOR is much more tenuous than implied by the literature.

KEYWORDS:

• Orienting
• inhibition of return
• object-based

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1. Frequentist analyses were conducted in R using the ez package (Lawrence, 2013), while Bayes factors were computed in JASP (JASP Team, 2018), and interpreted according to the scale proposed by Wagenmakers et al. (2018 – Table 1).

2. Upon visual inspection of the data in Figure 5, this effect in the 180-deg condition could be interpreted as object-based facilitation when contrasted with the mean RTs in the 90-deg condition. However, cue-elicited facilitation is short-lasting (<300 ms) and not motoric (Hilchey, Klein, et al., 2014) and is unlikely to be the cause of the effect at the 1260 ms CTOA.

3. When Abrams and Dobkin's 14 ms result is included meta-analytically, the CI95 for the effect marginally excludes zero: 5.09 [0.63, 9.55].

4. Bayes factors from a Bayesian repeated measures ANOVA on the object-based cueing effect across the present experiments showed anecdotal evidence for the null for the main effect of Cueing, BF₁₀ = 0.426, extreme evidence for the main effect of Experiment, BF₁₀ = 3.99e + 3, and strong evidence for a null model of the interaction, BF₁₀ = 0.10.

Additional information

Funding

The present work was supported by NSERC CGS and a Killam Graduate Scholarship awarded to RSR, NSERC PDF to MDH, and a NSERC Discovery Grant awarded to RMK.