Searching for inhibition of return in visual search: A review

AbstractStudies that followed the covert and overt probe-following-search paradigms of Klein (1988) and Klein and MacInnes (1999) to explore inhibition of return (IOR) in search are analyzed and evaluated. An IOR effect is consistently observed when the search display (or scene) remains visible when probing and lasts for at least 1000ms or about four previous inspected items (or locations). These findings support the idea that IOR facilitates foraging by discouraging orienting toward previously examined regions and items. Methodological and conceptual issues are discussed leading to methodological recommendations and suggestions for experimentation

Repeated Measurement of the Components of Attention of Older Adults using the Two Versions of the Attention Network Test: Stability, Isolability, Robustness, and Reliability

Ishigami and Klein (2010) showed that scores of the three attention networks (alerting, orienting, and executive control) measured with the two versions of the Attention Network Test (ANT; Fan et al., 2002; Callejas et al., 2005) were robust over 10 sessions of repeated testing even though practice effects were consistently observed especially in the executive network when young adults were tested. The current study replicated their method to examine robustness, stability, reliability, and isolability of the networks scores when older adults were tested with these ANTs. Ten test sessions, each containing two versions of the ANT, were administered to 10 older adults. Participants were asked to indicate the direction of a target arrow, flanked by distractors, presented either above or below the fixation following auditory signals or/and visual cue. Network scores were calculated using orthogonal subtractions of performance in selected conditions. All network scores remained highly significant even after nine previous sessions despite some practice effects in the executive and the alerting networks. Some lack of independence among the networks was found. The relatively poor reliability of network scores with one session of data rises to respectable levels as more data is added

Driving forces in free visual search : An ethology

Peer reviewedPostprin

Aftereffects of Saccades Explored in a Dynamic Neural Field Model of the Superior Colliculus

When viewing a scene or searching for a target, an observer usually makes a series of saccades that quickly shift the orientation of the eyes. The present study explored how one saccade affects subsequent saccades within a dynamic neural field model of the superior colliculus (SC). The SC contains an oculocentric motor map that encodes the vector of saccades and remaps to the new fixation location after each saccade. Our simulations demonstrated that the observation that saccades which reverse their vectors are slower to initiate than those which repeat vectors can be explained by the afore-mentioned remapping process and the internal dynamics of the SC. How this finding connects to the study of inhibition of return is discussed and suggestions for future studies are presented

Dissociating Orienting Biases From Integration Effects With Eye Movements

Despite decades of research, the conditions under which shifts of attention to prior target locations are facilitated or inhibited remain unknown. This ambiguity is a product of the popular feature discrimination task, in which attentional bias is commonly inferred from the efficiency by which a stimulus feature is discriminated after its location has been repeated or changed. Problematically, these tasks lead to integration effects; effects of target-location repetition appear to depend entirely on whether the target feature or response also repeats, allowing for several possible inferences about orienting bias. To parcel out integration effects and orienting biases, we designed the present experiments to require localized eye movements and manual discrimination responses to serially presented targets with randomly repeating locations. Eye movements revealed consistent biases away from prior target locations. Manual discrimination responses revealed integration effects. These data collectively revealed inhibited reorienting and integration effects, which resolve the ambiguity and reconcile episodic integration and attentional orienting accounts

The kinematics of the bi-lobal supernova remnant G 65.3+5.7 - Paper II

Further deep, narrow-band images in the light of [O III] 5007 A have been added to the previous mosaic of the faint galactic supernova remnant G 65.3+5.7. Additionally longslit spatially resolved [O III] 5007 A line profiles have been obtained at sample positions using the Manchester Echelle Spectrometer at the San Pedro Martir observatory. The remnant is shown to be predominantly bi-lobal with an EW axis for this structure. However, a faint additional northern lobe has now been revealed. Splitting of the profiles along the slit lengths, when extrapolated to the remnant's centre, although uncertain suggests that the expansion velocity of this remnant is between 124 and 187 km/s ie much lower than the 400 km/s previously predicted for the forward shock velocity from the X-ray emission. An expansion proper motion measurement of 2.1+-0.4 arcsec in 48 years for the remnant's filamentary edge in the light of Halpha+[N II] has also been made. When combined with an expansion velocity of ~155 km/s, a distance of ~800 pc to G 65.3+5.7 is derived. Several possibilities are considered for the large difference in the expansion velocity measured here and the 400 km/s shock velocity required to generate the X-ray emission. It is also suggested that the morphology of the remnant may be created by a tilt in the galactic magnetic field in this vicinity.Comment: 10 pages, 5 figures, accepted for publication in A&

Surgical correction of the wolff-parkinson-white syndrome in the closed heart using cryosurgery: A simplified approach

The conventional operation for ablation of accessory atrioventricular (AV) pathways in the Wolff-Parkinson-White syndrome requires an endocardial approach to the AV groove and necessitates the use of cardiopulmonary bypass and induced cardiac arrest. The feasibility of creating transmural atrial fibrosis at the level of the AV anulus in the closed heart in dogs without damaging the vascular contents of the AV fat pad was demonstrated. This was done by dissecting the fat pad from the atrium and applying a cryoprobe to the exposed atrial-anular region after retraction of the fat pad. The technique was then applied to successfully ablate 12 left parietal wall accessory pathways in 11 patients with the Wolff-Parkinson-White syndrome. This simplified approach to any parietal wall accessory pathway does not require cardiopulmonary bypass or induced cardiac arrest and may broaden the indications for this operation

Speed impairs attending on the left: comparing attentional asymmetries for neglect patients in speeded and unspeeded cueing tasks

Visuospatial neglect after stroke is often characterized by a disengage deficit on a cued orienting task, in which individuals are disproportionately slower to respond to targets presented on the contralesional side of space following an ispilesional cue as compared to the reverse. The purpose of this study was to investigate the generality of the finding of a disengage deficit on another measure of cued attention, the temporal order judgment (TOJ) task, that does not depend upon speeded manual responses. Individuals with right hemisphere stroke with and without spatial neglect and older healthy controls (OHC) were tested with both a speeded RT cueing task and an unspeeded TOJ-with-cuing task. All stroke patients evidenced a disengage deficit on the speeded RT cueing task, although the size and direction of the bias was not associated with the severity of neglect. In contrast, few neglect patients showed a disengage deficit on the TOJ task. This discrepancy suggests that the disengage deficit may be related to task demands, rather than solely due to impaired attentional mechanisms per se. Further, the results of our study show that the disengage deficit is neither necessary nor sufficient for neglect to manifest