Effect Of Working Memory On Multi-location IOR Under Sequential Cueing Condition

Research on attention discovered a phenomenon called Inhibition of Return (IOR), and consider this as a mechanism conducive to efficient visual search.Working memory is an important factor which affects the generation and magnitude of the IOR. Research of Castel et al. (2003) showed that the IOR reduces rapidly or even disappear under the load of spatial WM, but does not change under language WM. Jin et al. found that language and visual WM load do not affect IOR in detection task, but reduce it rapidly in discrimination task. Zhang et al.(2007) showed that IOR effect disappears under spatial WM load, but has Increasing trend under visual and language WM load.The current research investigated on the effect of working memory on Multi-location IOR. The result showed that Multi-location IOR disappears under spatial working memory load; it still exists under language working memory load, but IOR in each location reduces. It suggests that spatial working memory load plays an important role in maintaining and updating the information of Multi-location IOR. This result provides an evidence of interaction between spatial working memory and selective attention.