Abstract
Inhibition of Return (IOR) refers to an individual’s slowed localization or discrimination performance for targets that appear in previously cued versus uncued location after a relatively long delay after cue (∼300–500 ms). The current study adopted a cue-target paradigm and used behavioral and event-related potential (ERP) measures to investigate whether IOR would be modulated by emotional faces during an emotion recognition task. For reaction time measure, we found IOR effect and the magnitude of IOR effect were comparable for fearful face target and neutral face target. For ERP measures, valid cues were associated with smaller P1 and larger N1 waveform than that for invalid cues. Fearful faces were associated with a larger N170 than neutral faces. The onset latency of the stimulus-locked lateralised readiness potential (LRP) in the valid cue condition was longer than that in the invalid cue condition, while there was no significant difference on the onset latency of the response-locked LRP between the valid cue and invalid cue condition. These results support the notion that, regardless the emotion component of the stimulus, the inhibitory bias of attention to previous visited location before response contributes to the IOR.
Highlights
Considering that you are searching for food, the places you have searched before should be avoided to search again
This study investigated whether Inhibition of return (IOR) would be affected by emotional faces appeared in the target place in a discrimination task
In contrast to our prediction, it was discovered that fearful faces induced attentional bias with the magnitude of IOR comparable to that for neutral faces, demonstrating that emotional targets do not influence the IOR effect in a discrimination task
Summary
Considering that you are searching for food, the places you have searched before should be avoided to search again. Such a mechanism that encourages orienting toward only novel location would be useful. IOR describes an attentional cueing effect where participants respond slower to targets in cued locations compared to uncued locations. Klein and MacInnes (2010) suggested that IOR improves search processes by inhibiting the search of visited locations. IOR is a “foraging facilitator” that enhances the efficiency during a visual search, and allows people to process targets that appear in novel positions more efficiently. IOR seems to promote visual capture by new locations, increasing the likelihood that the viewer will detect new information
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