Abstract
Spatial interactions between consecutive movements are often attributed to inhibition of return (IOR), a phenomenon in which responses to previously signalled locations are slower than responses to unsignalled locations. In two experiments using peripheral target signals offset by 0°, 90°, or 180°, we show that consecutive saccadic (Experiment 1) and reaching (Experiment 3) responses exhibit a monotonic pattern of reaction times consistent with the currently established spatial distribution of IOR. In contrast, in two experiments with central target signals (i.e., arrowheads pointing at target locations), we find a non-monotonic pattern of reaction times for saccades (Experiment 2) and reaching movements (Experiment 4). The difference in the patterns of results observed demonstrates different behavioral effects that depend on signal type. The pattern of results observed for central stimuli are consistent with a model in which neural adaptation is occurring within motor networks encoding movement direction in a distributed manner.
Highlights
In everyday tasks such as reading, driving, or eating, we engage in sequences of spatially directed movements
The presence or absence of IOR has been studied across all possible combinations of these response and signal types [3], the spatial distribution of IOR, i.e. the pattern of reaction time (RT) observed for targets that are presented at, intermediate to, or opposite the cued location, remains incompletely characterized for different signal types
Because error rates were less than 1% in each offset condition, they were not analyzed further
Summary
In everyday tasks such as reading, driving, or eating, we engage in sequences of spatially directed movements. The spatial distribution of IOR is well established when peripheral stimuli are used (as described below) [8,9,10,11,12,13,14,15,16], the same cannot be said when central arrowhead stimuli are used This is because previous studies using central signals have relied on the use of two target locations, typically aligned to the left and right of fixation Previous work that has inferred the presence of IOR while using central signals and only two possible target locations, may have missed important data points regarding the spatial properties of the (putatively observed) IOR phenomenon It remains unclear whether IOR experiments using central signals will reveal distributed behavioural effects to that observed with peripheral signals
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