Environment- and eye-centered inhibitory cueing effects are both observed after a methodological confound is eliminated

Abstract

Inhibition of return (IOR), typically explored in cueing paradigms, is a performance cost associated with previously attended locations and has been suggested as a crucial attentional mechanism that biases orientation towards novelty. In their seminal IOR paper, Posner and Cohen (1984) showed that IOR is coded in spatiotopic or environment-centered coordinates. Recent studies, however, have consistently reported IOR effects in both spatiotopic and retinotopic (eye-centered) coordinates. One overlooked methodological confound of all previous studies is that the spatial gradient of IOR is not considered when selecting the baseline for estimating IOR effects. This methodological issue makes it difficult to tell if the IOR effects reported in previous studies were coded in retinotopic or spatiotopic coordinates, or in both. The present study addresses this issue with the incorporation of no-cue trials to a modified cueing paradigm in which the cue and target are always intervened by a gaze-shift. The results revealed that a) IOR is indeed coded in both spatiotopic and retinotopic coordinates, and b) the methodology of previous work may have underestimated spatiotopic and retinotopic IOR effects.