Dissociating inhibition of return from endogenous orienting of spatial attention: Evidence from detection and discrimination tasks

Abstract

In the present series of experiments, peripheral informative cues were used in order to dissociate endogenous and exogenous orienting of spatial attention using the same set of stimuli. For each block of trials, the cue predicted either the same or the opposite location of target appearance. Crucially, using this manipulation, both expected and unexpected locations could be either cued or uncued. If one accepts the hypothesis that inhibition of return (IOR) is an attentional effect that inhibits the returning of attention to a previously attended location (Posner & Cohen, 1984), one would not predict an IOR effect at the expected location, since attention should not disengage from the location predicted by the cue. Detection and discrimination tasks were used to examine any potential difference in the mechanism responsible for IOR as a function of the task at hand. Two major results emerged: First, IOR was consistently observed at the expected location, where, according to the traditional “reorienting” hypothesis, IOR is not supposed to occur. Second, a different time course of cueing effects was found in detection versus discrimination tasks, even after controlling for the orienting of attention. We conclude that IOR cannot be accounted for solely by the “reorienting of attention” hypothesis. Moreover, we argue that the observed time course differences in cueing effects between detection and discrimination tasks cannot be explained by attention disengaging from cues later in discrimination than in detection tasks, as proposed by Klein (2000). The described endogenous–exogenous dissociation is consistent with models postulating that endogenous and exogenous attentional processes rely on different neural mechanisms.