Inhibition of return in a discrimination task.

Inhibition of return (IOR) refers to a bias against returning visual attention to a location that has been recently attended. Although IOR has been demonstrated in a wide range of detection tasks, it has not been reliably shown in discrimination tasks. The results of the present experiment, in which eye movement responses and a cue-target procedure were used, indicate that IOR can exist in a discrimination task. Moreover, the results indicate that the amount of IOR in the discrimination task was approximately equal to that found in the detection task. The results suggest that IOR will be obtained in a discrimination task if the prior allocation of attention does not yield any useful information concerning the forthcoming discrimination judgment.