The effect of inhibition of return on lexical access

Inhibition of return refers to a bias against returning attention to a loca tion or object that has been recently attended. Recent research has shown t hat inhibition of return return cart be found not only in simple detection tasks, but also in tasks requiring relatively simple discrimination judgmen ts. The present experiments examined whether inhibition of return occurs in tasks that require complex discriminations such as lexical decision and ca tegorization tasks. Not only was inhibition of return found in both experim ents, but a greater amount of inhibition was found for low-frequency wards than for high-frequency words. These findings suggest that inhibition of re turn not only inhibits returning attention to previously attended locations , but can also affect the processing that is required for lexical access.