title: Spatial gradients of oculomotor inhibition of return in deaf and normal adults.
abstract: We explored the effect of deafness on the spatial (gradient) and temporal (decay) properties of oculomotor inhibition of return (IOR) using a task developed by Vaughan (Theoretical and applied aspects of eye movement research. Elsevier, North Holland, pp 143-150, 1984) in which participants made a sequence of saccades to carefully placed targets . Unlike IOR tasks in which ignored cues are used to explore the aftereffects of covert orienting, this task better approximates real-world behavior in which participants are free to make eye movements to potentially relevant inputs. Because IOR is a bias against returning attention and gaze to a previously attended location, we expected to find, and we did find, slower saccades toward previously fixated locations. Replicating Vaughan, a gradient of inhibition around a previously fixated location was observed and this inhibition began to decay after 1200 ms. Importantly, there were no significant differences between the deaf and the normal hearing subjects, on neither the magnitude of oculomotor IOR, nor its decay over time, nor its gradient around the previously fixated location .
authors.affiliation: Center for Mind and Brain Sciences, University of Trento, Trento, Italy.
authors.forename: Srikant
authors.initials: S
authors.lastname: Jayaraman
authors.affiliation: Department of Psychology and Neuroscience, Dalhousie University, Halifax, NS, B3H 4R2, Canada. ray.klein@dal.ca.
authors.forename: Raymond M
authors.identifier: http://orcid.org/0000-0002-3854-4498
authors.initials: RM
authors.lastname: Klein
authors.affiliation: Department of Psychology and Neuroscience, Dalhousie University, Halifax, NS, B3H 4R2, Canada.
authors.forename: Matthew D
authors.initials: MD
authors.lastname: Hilchey
authors.affiliation: Ali Yavar Jung National Institute for the Hearing Handicapped, Secunderabad, India.
authors.forename: Gouri Shanker
authors.initials: GS
authors.lastname: Patil
authors.affiliation: Center for Neural and Cognitive Sciences, University of Hyderabad, Gachibowli, India.
authors.forename: Ramesh Kumar
authors.initials: RK
authors.lastname: Mishra
mesh_terms: D000293:Adolescent; D000328:Adult; D001288:Attention / Q000502:physiology*; D003638:Deafness / Q000503:physiopathology*; D005133:Eye Movements / Q000502:physiology*; D006801:Humans; D007266:Inhibition, Psychological; D011597:Psychomotor Performance / Q000502:physiology*; D055815:Young Adult
keywords: Attention; Deaf; Inhibition of return; Oculomotor IOR; Saccades