title: Contingent capture and inhibition of return: a comparison of mechanisms.
abstract: We investigated the cause(s) of two effects associated with involuntary attention in the spatial cueing task: contingent capture and inhibition of return (IOR). Previously, we found that there were two mechanisms of involuntary attention in this task: (1) a (serial) search mechanism that predicts a larger cueing effect in reaction time with more display locations and (2) a decision (threshold) mechanism that predicts a smaller cueing effect with more display locations (Prinzmetal et al. 2010). In the present study, contingent capture and IOR had completely different patterns of results when we manipulated the number of display locations and the presence of distractors. Contingent capture was best described by a search model, whereas the inhibition of return was best described by a decision model. Furthermore, we fit a linear ballistic accumulator model to the results and IOR was accounted for by a change of threshold, whereas the results from contingent capture experiments could not be fit with a change of threshold and were better fit by a search model.
authors.affiliation: Psychology Department, University of California, Berkeley, CA 94720, USA. wprinz@berkeley.edu
authors.forename: William
authors.initials: W
authors.lastname: Prinzmetal
authors.forename: Jordan A
authors.initials: JA
authors.lastname: Taylor
authors.forename: Loretta Barry
authors.initials: LB
authors.lastname: Myers
authors.forename: Jacqueline
authors.initials: J
authors.lastname: Nguyen-Espino
mesh_terms: D000704:Analysis of Variance; D001288:Attention / Q000502:physiology*; D003118:Color Perception; D003463:Cues; D003657:Decision Making / Q000502:physiology*; D005133:Eye Movements; D005260:Female; D006801:Humans; D007266:Inhibition, Psychological; D008297:Male; D011939:Mental Recall / Q000502:physiology; D008960:Models, Psychological; D010775:Photic Stimulation / Q000379:methods; D011336:Probability; D011930:Reaction Time / Q000502:physiology; D013028:Space Perception / Q000502:physiology*; D013334:Students; D014495:Universities