Inhibition Of Return (IOR)
Measure how attention suppresses returning to previously attended locations.
Inhibition of Return Task
Welcome to the Inhibition of Return (IOR) experiment. This task measures how your attention is affected by previously attended locations. In this task, you will see a fixation cross (+) in the center of the screen with two boxes on either side. A cue (yellow circle) will briefly appear in one of the boxes, followed by a target (green circle) in either the same box or the opposite box. Your task is to respond as quickly as possible when you see the target by pressing the corresponding key: 'A' for left or 'L' for right. Try to keep your eyes on the fixation cross throughout the experiment. You will first complete a short practice session before the main experiment begins. Ready? Press 'Start' to begin the practice trials.
عرض التفاصيل
What is the Inhibition Of Return (IOR)?
Inhibition Of Return (IOR) is a phenomenon first described by Michael Posner and Yoav Cohen in 1984. People are slower in detecting relevant stimuli at positions that have been attended shortly before to view an uninformative cue (time between uninformative cue and target has to be at least 300 ms). The effect is, absolutely speaking, relatively small. The response time difference between detecting relevant stimuli at locations that were cued before and locations that were not cued before is around 20 ms. The effect size depends strongly on the interval between cue and stimulus. At shorter times between cue and target, people respond faster to locations that were previously cued.
About this experiment
In this example, you need to respond to a green stimulus "GO". In each trial, you need to ignore the "X" stimulus. The "X" functions here as an uninformative cue. It is "uninformative" because the location of the "X" is randomly chosen. The time between the "cue" and the "target" stimulus in this example is 1 second. At the end, you will see how fast your responded in cued and uncued locations.
The demo takes less than 5 minutes to complete (100 trials).
Further reading
- Abrams, R. A., & Dobkin, R. S. (1994). The gap effect and inhibition of return: Interactive effects on eye movement latencies. Experimental Brain Research, 98, 483-487.
- Abrams, R. A., & Dobkin, R. S. (1994). Inhibition of return: Effects of attentional cuing on eye movement latencies. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception and Performance, 20, 467-477.
- Klein, R. M. (2000). Inhibition of return. Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 4, 138-146.
- Posner, M.I. & Cohen, Y.P.C. (1984). Components of visual orienting. In H. Bouma & D. Bouwhuis (Eds.), Attention and performance X: Control of language processes (pp. 531–556). London: Lawrence Erlbaum.
- Pratt, J., & Abrams, R. A. (1999). Inhibition of return in discrimination tasks. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception and Performance, 25, 229-242.