Fruitful visual search: Inhibition of return in a virtual foraging task

Abstract

Inhibition of return (IOR) has long been viewed as a foraging facilitator in visual search. We investigated the contribution of IOR in a task that approximates natural foraging more closely than typical visual search tasks. Participants in a fully immersive virtual reality environment manually searched an array of leaves for a hidden piece of fruit, using a wand to select and examine each leaf location. Search was slower than in typical IOR paradigms, taking seconds instead of a few hundred milliseconds. Participants also made a speeded response when they detected a flashing leaf that either was or was not in a previously searched location. Responses were slower when the flashing leaf was in a previously searched location than when it was in an unvisited location. These results generalize IOR to an approximation of a naturalistic visual search setting and support the hypothesis that IOR can facilitate foraging. The experiment also constitutes the first use of a fully immersive virtual reality display in the study of IOR.

Balancing energetic and cognitive resources: Memory use during search depends on the orienting effector

“…The present results indicate that this recruitment of larger and more costly muscle groups is likely to increase the reliance on internal processing. As the study of search extends beyond traditional static computer tasks and embraces the full suite of embodied behaviors involved in search (e.g., Gilchrist et al, 2001;Robinson, Koth, & Ringenbach, 1976;Ruddle & Lessels, 2006;Smith, Hood, & Gilchrist, 2008;Solman, Cheyne, & Smilek, 2012;Solman, Wu, Cheyne, & Smilek, 2013;Summala, Pasanen, Räsänen, & Sievänen, 1996;Thomas et al, 2006), consideration of these 1 Adapting the RT reconstruction method used to validate P m estimates in the results section, we estimated the expected eye-contingent repeated search RTs if memory use matched that observed for head-contingent search. In particular, we used head-contingent Initiation Times (h i ) and P m values, eye-contingent random search times (e r ) and decision times (e d ), and a non-zero memory search time chosen as the duration of a typical saccade (t m = 50 ms): RT Ã = h i + e d + (1 À P m ) e r + P m t m .…”

Facilitation of return during scene viewing

“…However, although IOR is well established during the search of abstract object arrays, it is currently unclear whether IOR exists when viewing naturalistic visual scenes. During physical search of real-world scenes, participants rarely revisit searched locations (Gilchrist, North, & Hood, 2001;Thomas et al, 2006), but this may be the result of participants remembering where they have previously searched rather than a spatial consequence of IOR. When viewing natural visual scenes, viewer's fixations cluster around a small number of regions that are deemed significant by the viewer (Buswell, 1935;Yarbus, 1967).…”

“…IOR results in longer manual and saccadic reaction times to targets presented at the last fixation location. The phenomenon was first reported by Posner and Cohen (1984) in the context of cueing paradigms but has subsequently been observed in visual search (Klein, 1988;Klein & MacInnes, 1999), reading (Rayner, Juhasz, Ashby, & Clifton, 2003;Weger & Inhoff, 2006), auditory and manual reaction tasks (Spence & Driver, 1998;Tassinari & Berlucchi, 1995) and search in three-dimensional environments (Thomas et al, 2006). It has been proposed that this temporal inhibition may have a spatial consequence: By inhibiting previously examined locations the probability of orienting to new locations will increase (Klein, 1988;Klein & MacInnes, 1999;Posner & Cohen, 1984).…”

Inhibitory cueing effects following manual and saccadic responses to arrow cues

“…It is worth noting that the ICE evoked by oculomotor activation, as revealed by the saccadic-manual task, is largely dispersed 3 s after cue onset. These observations dovetail with the finding that, in visual search tasks, IOR (or inhibitory) tags at manually searched locations (Thomas et al, 2006) last longer than those at previously fixated locations (Dodd, Van der Stigchel, & Hollingworth, 2009), implying that the oculomotor and skeletomotor systems are responsible for relatively fast and slow overt orienting, respectively.…”

“…With central arrow cues and targets, Cowper-Smith, Eskes, and Westwood (2013) observed slower reaching responses toward previously touched locations, providing clear evidence that skeletomotor activation also gives rise to outputbased ICEs. Although such an ICE does not meet the theoretical definition of IOR (Hilchey et al, 2014;Posner et al, 1985), it dovetails with the observation of inhibitory tags in manual foraging (Thomas et al, 2006) and affords the function of biasing orienting toward novelty.…”