On the strategic modulation of the time course of facilitation and inhibition of return.

In studies of exogenous attentional orienting, response times for targets at previously cued locations are often longer than those for targets at previously uncued locations. This effect is known widely as inhibition of return (IOR). There has been debate as to whether IOR can be observed in discrimination as well as detection tasks. The experiments reported here confirm that IOR can be observed when target discrimination is required and that …