Location- and object-based inhibition of return are affected by different kinds of working memory

Abstract

Castel, Pratt, and Craik (2003) have shown that inhibition of return (IOR, the delayed response to a recently cued item) is disrupted by a secondary task that involves spatial working memory (WM), and they suggest that IOR is mediated by spatial WM. However, they did not specify what kind of IOR was involved. We used a dual-task paradigm to examine whether the two kinds of IOR (location- and object-based IOR) are affected by two kinds of secondary task that involve spatial and nonspatial WM, respectively. The results show that location-based IOR was disrupted by a spatial secondary task while the object-based IOR was disrupted by a nonspatial secondary task. The present study further elaborates the conclusion of Castel et al. (2003) by differentiating the effect of the two kinds of WM (spatial vs. nonspatial) on the two kinds of IOR (location based vs. object based).

Keywords:

• Attention
• Visual perception
• Dual task

This research is supported by the National Science Council of Taiwan (NSC95-2752-H-002-007-PAE & 96-2413-H-002-009-MY3).

Notes

¹ If Experiments 1a to 1d were combined in a 2 (display type: dots vs. triangles) × 2 (task type: direction vs. object) × 2 (trial type: valid vs. invalid) design, the three-way interaction was not significant, F(1, 76) = 2.56, MSE = 215.89, p > .05. Although this can be easily explained by low power due to the between-subject design, this result makes it clear that it is necessary to test our hypothesis more rigorously.