DOES IOR OCCUR IN DISCRIMINATION TASKS - YES, IT DOES, BUT LATER

When a stimulus appears in a previously cued location several hundred milliseconds after the cue, the time required to detect that stimulus is greater than when it appears in an uncued location. This increase i n detection time is known as inhibition of return (IOR). It has been s uggested that IOR reflects the action of a general attentional mechani sm that prevents attention from returning to previously explored loci. At the same time, the robustness of IOR has been recently disputed, g iven several failures to obtain the effect in tasks requiring discrimi nation rather than detection. In a series of eight experiments, we eva luated the differences between detection and discrimination tasks with regard to IOR. We found that IOR was consistently obtained with both tasks, although the temporal parameters required to observe IOR were d ifferent in detection and discrimination tasks. In our detection task, the effect appeared after a 400-msec delay between cue and target, an d was still present after 1,300 msec. In our discrimination task, the effect appeared later and disappeared sooner. The implications of thes e data for theoretical accounts of IOR are discussed.