1. Sven Panis Maximilian Wolkersdorfer Thomas Schmidt
Disentangling the within-trial time courses of different types of inhibition of return
Sven Panis Maximilian Wolkersdorfer Thomas Schmidt
University of Kaiserslautern, Germany ECVP 2017, Berlin contact:
General introduction. The current practices in experimental psychology of comparing mean correct RTs and mean error-rates using ANOVA [and distributional approaches based on quantiles such as delta-plots] are so accepted that it is hard to imagine that these data analysis techniques actually conceal very systematic and often unexpected temporal response patterns that appear when the passage of time is explicitly taken into account. They thus mislead us when studying the content, duration, and temporal organization of cognitive processes (mental chronometry).
Inhibition-of-return. When a lateralized target is preceded by a spatially valid cue with an SOA > ~250 ms, mean correct RT is longer than with invalid cues (inhibition of return, IOR; Klein, 2000). The attentional inhibition explanation has been contested by explanations focusing on motor inhibition (Taylor & Klein, 2000), (working) memory (Castel, Pratt, & Craik, 2003), and perceptual integration processes (Lupiáñez, Martín-Arévalo, & Chica, 2013).
In Experiment 1 a 50 ms cue display (valid, invalid, central, no cue) was followed with some ISI (50, 150, 250, 350, 450, or infinite ms) by a 100 ms target display (a square on the left or right). Participants had to press 1 button within 600 ms when they detected the target.
In Experiment 2 a 50 ms cue display (valid, invalid, no cue) was followed by a 50 ms central cue display (present/absent) with some SOA, and finally a 100 ms target display (a square on the left or right) with some cue-target SOA. Participants had to indicate the target location by pressing a left or right button within 400 ms.
Because the mean RT conceals the within-trial time course of the effect of an experimental manipulation (Panis & Schmidt, 2016; see researchgate for the paper and R code), we employ discrete time hazard functions of response occurrence and conditional accuracy functions, that is, event history analysis.
Experiment 1. Detection task (red vertical line = cue offset; black vertical line = target onset): data from 1 participant & aggregated data across six participants
Experiment 2. Localization task (blue vertical line = peripheral cue onset; black vertical line = target onset; orange line = central cue onset): data from 2 participants
Discussion
Experiment 1. We find that (a) the first detection responses are time-locked to the cue, and (b) that IOR appears in the h(t) functions around 240 ms after target onset whenever the cue-target SOA is at least 250 ms, and that this target-locked IOR lasts about 80 ms.
Experiment 2. We find that (a) the first localization responses are time-locked to the cue (and 100% correct for a valid cue and 0% correct for an invalid cue), (b) when the central cue is absent, IOR appears in the hazard functions around 240 ms after target onset (i.e., a higher hazard for invalid compared to valid cues) – but not for subject 2 – , and lasts ms, while most responses emitted after 240 ms are error-free, and (c) when the central cue is present, IOR can also appear temporarily in the conditional accuracy functions (i.e., a higher accuracy of emitted responses for invalid compared to valid cues), time-locked to central cue onset, and possibly followed by two (central-cue-locked and target-locked) IOR periods in the hazard functions.
These distributional results suggest that different forms of IOR can be temporally disentangled within a trial.
References
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