Abstract
Inhibition of irrelevant information and response tendencies is a central characteristic of conscious control and executive functions. However, recent theories in vision considered Inhibition of Return (IOR: slower responses to attended than unattended positions) to be a hallmark of automatic exogenous capture of visual attention by unconscious cues. In the present study, we show that an unconscious cue that exogenously captures attention does not lead to IOR. First of all, subliminal cues with a contrast different from a searched-for target contrast capture attention independently of their match of contrast polarity to the search criteria. This is found with a short cue-target interval (Exp. 1). However, the same cues do not lead to IOR with a long cue-target interval. The lack of IOR is also verified for several intermediate intervals (Exp. 2), for high-contrast cues and low-contrast targets (Exp. 3), and with lower luminance cues presented on a CRT screen (Exp. 4). Finally, no capture effect but IOR is found for consciously perceived anti-predictive cues (Exp. 5). Together the results support the notion of a double dissociation between IOR and exogenous capture and are in line with a decisive role of consciousness for inhibition.
Highlights
IntroductionConscious control allows inhibition of irrelevant information (cf. Baars, 2002; Botvinick et al, 2004), but inhibition has been found with task-relevant unconscious stimuli (Lau and Passingham, 1998)
Conscious control allows inhibition of irrelevant information, but inhibition has been found with task-relevant unconscious stimuli (Lau and Passingham, 1998)
All participants reported a subjective unawareness of the cues during the target-detection task, but the cue detection-block revealed above chance accuracy for the shortest and longest Stimulus Onset Asynchrony (SOA), whereas the cue remained below the objective threshold in the other SOAs
Summary
Conscious control allows inhibition of irrelevant information (cf. Baars, 2002; Botvinick et al, 2004), but inhibition has been found with task-relevant unconscious stimuli (Lau and Passingham, 1998). Mulckhuyse and Theeuwes (2010) argued that Inhibition of Return (IOR) could be a hallmark of exogenous capture of visual attention by unconscious cues. In this context, exogenous capture denotes attentional capture by a truly task-irrelevant stimulus, and IOR denotes that participants respond slower to recently attended but ignored positions than to less attended positions (cf Taylor and Klein, 1998). Presenting a cue with a cue-target Stimulus Onset Asynchrony (SOA) of less than about 300 ms at one of two possible target positions, attentional capture to the cue is reflected in facilitated responses to a target at the same position (SP) as the cue. With SOAs of more than about 300 ms, this cueing effect reverses into IOR and responses will often be slower in SP than DP conditions
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