Predictive Remapping Gives Rise To Environmental Inhibition Of Return

Inhibition of return(IOR)refers to the phenomenon that attention tend not to revisit recently visited location.IOR is believed to discourage attention from returning and thereby biases attention toward novel locations during visual search.To efficiently facilitate foraging,IOR must be coded in spatiotopic coordinates.As shown in previous work,after IOR is generated by an onset cue an IOR effect will be observed at the cued location,event after the gaze has been shifted to a new location.That is,IOR could operate in spatiotopic coordinates.However,more recent evidence suggests that IOR is not only coded in spatiotopic coordinates,but also in retinotopic coordinates.In previous studies,researchers have argued that IOR may remapped to support its spatiotopic frame of reference.The remapping theory suggests that,though this IOR effect appears to be coded in spatiotopic coordinates,it is indeed the result of remapping on retinotopic brain maps,which compensates the shift of retinal image by eye movements.This retinotopic activation was probed in study 1.In this study,the participants made two saccades,the first one evoked remapping whereas the second one brings the remapped retinotopic locus to a spatial location that has not been cued before.IOR was indeed observed at this location,suggesting that retinotopy was the fundamental property of IOR.In study 2,we examined if the remapping of IOR effects is predictive.The participant move eyes to a peripheral location after an IOR effect had been induced by a cue,and a target was presented around the time of saccade.Immediately before the impending eye movement,IOR was observed at the retinal locus that would be brought to the cued location.A second task in which the participant maintained fixation during the entire trial ruled out the possibility that this IOR effect was the spillover of IOR from the cued location.These findings,for the first time,provide direct behavioral evidence that predictive remapping is a mechanism behind spatiotopic IOR.