Vertical asymmetries and inhibition of return: Effects of spatial and non-spatial cueing on behavior and visual ERPs

Abstract

The mechanisms underlying inhibition of return (IOR) are still under debate. Besides the probable implication of several processes in its generation, a reason for this uncertainty may be related to experimental factors affecting the presence, time course, and magnitude of IOR. Two of them may be related to the arrangement of the stimuli in the visual field that could cause possible interactions between IOR and response conflict effects (horizontal arrangements) or between IOR and perceptual asymmetries (vertical arrangement). The purpose of the present study was to explore location and color cueing effects with a vertical arrangement of stimuli, free of S-R compatibility effects. To examine this possibility, a cue-back task with stimuli in the vertical meridian was employed. Targets could randomly and equiprobably appear at cued or uncued locations, or with cued or uncued color. These cueing effects were analyzed on behavior and ERPs separately for upper and lower visual fields (UVF and LVF). Under location cueing, behavioral responses were slower (spatial IOR) in both hemifields. In the ERPs, N1 reductions were observed in both visual fields although with different modulations in their latency and scalp distribution. In the P3 rising beginning, posterior negative deflections in the LVF (Nd) and anterior positive deflections (Pd) in the UVF were observed. Under color cueing, P3 amplitude was reduced in the UVF accompanied by no behavioral effects. These results suggest that different patterns of brain activation can be obtained in upper and lower visual fields under spatial- and non-spatial cueing conditions.

Stimulus-Locked and Response-Locked ERP Correlates of Spatial Inhibition of Return (IOR) in Old Age

“…To control for possible interactions between IOR and spatial compatibility between target location and response hand (Ivanoff et al, 2002), the stimuli were presented along the vertical meridian. Moreover, as vertical asymmetries in visual processing have been reported in behavioral and psychophysiological studies (Amenedo, Pazo-lvarez, & Cadaveira, 2007;Di Russo, Martínez, Sereno, Pitzalis, & Hillyard, 2001;GutiØrrez-Domínguez et al, 2014;Karim & Kojima, 2010;Rezec & Dobkins, 2004;Thomas & Elias, 2011), we analyzed the data from the lower and the upper visual fields separately. In general, when analyzing the results of the age-related effects, the older participants showed slower RTs, more negative cue-locked and response-locked ERPs, and a more homogeneous scalp distribution in target-locked ERPs.…”

“…IOR has also been observed across a variety of tasks, including detection, localization, and discrimination tasks (see Klein, 2000, for a review), and even in natural scenes (Klein & MacInnes, 1999), which has led to consider it as a basis for selecting important information. IOR has been classically studied with behavioral measures, and its neural correlates are still poorly understood although recent research indicates that IOR may arise from a combination of inhibited perceptual processing (GutiØrrez-Domínguez et al, 2014;Handy, Jha, & Mangun, 1999;McDonald, Ward, & Kiehl, 1999;Prime, Visser, & Ward, 2006;Prime presentations (Castel, Chasteen, Scialfa, & Pratt, 2003;Langley, Fuentes, Hochhalter, Brandt, & Overmier, 2001;Langley, Fuentes, Vivas, & Saville, 2007;Langley, Vivas, Fuentes, & Bagne, 2005;Wascher, Falkenstein, & Wild-Wall, 2011). This longer time course of IOR in old age has been recently interpreted as reflecting a later disengagement from the cue location in aged persons (Castel et al, 2003;Langley, Friesen, Saville, & Ciernia, 2011).…”

“…Among these effects, two of them have been the most frequently observed, and consisted of a negative shift (generally called in this context of research Negative difference, or Nd) or a positive shift (Positive difference, or Pd) occurring during the rising period of the P3 component. The interpretation of such shifts is still under debate (GutiØrrez-Domínguez et al, 2014;Hopf et al, 2000Hopf et al, , 2004McDonald, Hickey, Green, & Whitman, 2009;Tian, Chica, et al, 2011). The age-related changes of above target-locked IOR effects have not been previously studied.…”

Is Inhibition of Return Modulated by Involuntary Orienting of Spatial Attention: An ERP Study

“…The Nd component reflecting a relation with IOR was often investigated at occipital electrodes during a time window ranging approximately from 200 to 300 ms ( Prime and Ward, 2004 , 2006 ; Wascher and Tipper, 2004 ; Satel et al, 2013 ). The Nd component had been related to the facilitatory effect for enhancement of the cued location ( Eimer, 1993 , 1994 ; Martín-Arévalo et al, 2014 ) and to the IOR effect for reduction of the cued location ( Prime and Jolicoeur, 2009 ; Satel et al, 2012 ; Gutiérrez-Domínguez et al, 2014 ). The present experiment showed an inhibitory effect of Nd.…”

The Different Inhibition of Return (IOR) Effects of Emergency Managerial Experts and Novices: An Event-Related Potentials Study

“…Two-hundred and fifty-six landscape pictures, which matched with the emergency pictures in perceptual features, such as size, pixel and so on, were selected as stimuli. Because pictures could automatically attracts individuals’ attention when a cue appears in visual field (Gutiérrez-Domínguez et al, 2014), to achieve the counter-balanced field of vision, the stimuli-presenting mode of bilateral vision was adopted in this experiment, i.e., one emergency picture and one landscape picture respectively presented each side of fixation, but only emergency pictures were analyzed when calculating data. A 2 (SOA: 200 ms vs. 400 ms) × 2 (Cue validity: cued vs. uncued) within-subjects design was employed.…”