The Effect Of Facial Distractors With Different Valences On Inhibition Of Return:Evidence From ERP

Inhibition of return(IOR)can improve the efficiency of visual search by inhibiting the searched position.It is an adaptive mechanism for human beings to face various stimuli in complex environment.In this study,we adopted different tasks and different conditions to explore the effect of facial distractors with different valences on IOR by using a modified paradigm of cue-target paradigm,and collected data with event-related potentials(ERP).In Experiment 1,a twice-cueing positioning task were used to examine the neural mechanism underlying the effect of neutral,negative and positive facial distractors on IOR.It was found that IOR was found in three kinds of facial distractor conditions,and the reaction time of valid cue was significantly greater than that of invalid cue.In addition,the reaction time of negative facial distractor condition was significantly faster than neutral and positive facial distractor conditions,but there was no significant difference in effect size of IOR under the three conditions.IOR was also found in EEG components N170,N200 and P300.We did not find that facial distractors with different valences modulate the IOR.The experimental results show that,under this task condition,IOR can appear stable,and not modulated by the valence of facial distractor.IOR shows a certain degree of “blindness”.In Experiment 2,a twice-cueing discrimination task were used to examine the neural mechanism underlying the effect of neutral,negative and positive facial distractors on IOR.Similar to experiment 1,it was found that IOR was found in three kinds of facial distractor conditions,and the reaction time of valid cue was significantly greater than that of invalid cue.In addition,effect size of IOR of neutral facial distractor condition was significantly greater than negative and positive facial distractor conditions,showing a certain emotional bias.At the same time,IOR was also found in EEG components N170 and P300.The experimental results show that,under this task condition,IOR can appear stable,and the valence of facial distractor modulate the IOR.In Experiment 3,we used a no twice-cueing discrimination task to examine the neural mechanism of IOR.Similar to experiment 1 and experiment 2,it was found that IOR was found in three kinds of facial distractor conditions,and the reaction time of valid cue was significantly greater than that of invalid cue.However,there was no significant difference in reaction time under different conditions,and there was no significant difference in effect size of IOR under different conditions.IOR was also found in EEG components N170 and P300.The experimental results show that,under this task condition,IOR can appear stable,and not modulated by the valence of facial distractor.IOR also shows a certain degree of “blindness”.The results of three experiments in this study show that IOR is a stable adaptive mechanism,but IOR can be modulated by the valence of facial distractor under certain conditions.In addition,there may be different ways of processing for IOR and processing of emotional information under different tasks.More importantly,IOR did not occur in the early stage of perceptual processing,but rather in the late stage of cognitive processing.Finally,with or without twice-cueing,IOR is stable,but the neural association between IOR and emotional information processing may not be very consistent.