The Influence Of Target Discrimination Difficulty And M/P Pathways On The Time Course Of IOR

Inhibition of Return(IOR)reflects a binary modulation triggered by a non-informative peripheral cue on target cognitive process.Whether the cue facilitates or inhibits information process of target depends on the cue-target onset asynchrony.Target discrimination difficulty as an important factor has remained some issues related to its role and cognitive mechanism in IOR effect.In this study,we adopted Ratcliff's diffusion decision model(DDM)to investigate the time course of IOR influenced by target discrimination difficulty which matched low-level attribute.In addition,a confusion was lied in the function of target discrimination difficulty and visual pathway in previous researches.Because some researchers held the opinion that they shared similar mechanism.Therefore,the current study applied a design that induced M/P pathways to differentiating the cognitive mechanism between target discrimination difficulty and M/P pathways on the occurrence and magnitude of IOR.In Experiment one,target discrimination difficulty that controlled similar stimulus attributes was designed using M-bias target,and the influence of target discrimination difficulty on the IOR in M pathway was investigated by using the three-factors within-subject design of 2(target discrimination difficulty)× 5(SOA)× 2(cueing).The results show that in the M pathway:(1)the modulation of target discrimination dificulty on the magnitude of IOR only appears on the accuracy index;(2)The facilitation effect in the early SOA and the IOR in the late SOA are mainly manifested as differences in the coding process in the cognitive information process.On the basis of Experiment 1,experiment two used P-bias target and investigated the influence of target discrimination difficulty on the IOR in P pathway by using three-factors within-subject design of 2(target discrimination difficulty)× 5(SOA)× 2(cueing).The results show that in the P pathway:(1)target discrimination difficulty has no modulation on the IOR;(2)The facilitation in the early SOA and IOR in the late SOA appear in all cognitive information process.Based on the comprehensive analysis of Experiment one and experiment two,it claims that(1)Target discrimination difficulty has no modulation on the occurrence of IOR.(2)The M/P pathway has a significant modulation on the IOR;(3)The DDM analysis further shows that the difference between M and P pathway on the IOR exists in the rate of extracting information from targets and it explained the reason for the difference of IOR between M and P pathway.In conclusion,the current study shows that 1)In the M pathway,target discrimination difficulty that controlled low-level attribute influences the IOR magnitude on the accuracy.However,there is no modulation of task difficulty on the occurrence of IOR both in M and P pathway.On the contrary,we observed the modulation of visual pathway(P pathway vs.M pathway)on the occurrence of the IOR.It suggests that visual pathway rather than target discrimination difficulty determines the time course of IOR and related cognitive theory maybe need to be revised accordingly.2)The information extraction process is an important stage of the IOR for visual pathway modulation.3)IOR contains a variety of components that influence the processing stage of the IOR.Their weights constitute the performance of the IOR in behavioral data.These results provide an important reference for future research on the IOR mechanism.