Unmasking the inhibition of return phenomenon

Conventional wisdom holds that a nonpredictive peripheral cue produces a biphasic response time (RT) pattern: early facilitation at the cued location, followed by an RT delay at that location. The latter effect is called inhibition of return (IOR). In two experiments, we report that IOR occurs at a cued location far earlier than was previously thought, and that it is distinct from attentional orienting. In Experiment 1, IOR was observed early (i.e., within 50 msec) at the cued location, when the cue predicted that a detection target would occur at another location. In Experiment 2, this early IOR effect was demonstrated to occur for target detection, but not for target identification. We conclude that previous failures to observe early IOR at a cued location may have been due to attention being directed to the cued location and thus “masking” IOR.