Inhibition of return (IOR) is an attention system process that involves a bias toward fresh stimuli and delayed creation of responses to targets in previously visited sites. According to the two-component hypothesis, IOR consists of perceptual and oculomotor components depending on whether the eye movement system is engaged (oculomotor IOR [O-IOR]). For a study, it was determined about the demonstration of previous research that multisensory integration reduced IOR when both visual and auditory modalities were used. However, it was unknown if the O-IOR effect is decreased by multisensory integration when the oculomotor system is active. Using the exogenous spatial cueing paradigm, researchers studied the influence of multisensory integration on O-IOR in two eye movement tests. Experiment 1 discovered that visual O-IOR outperformed audiovisual and auditory O-IOR in divided modality attention. The relative multisensory response enhancement (rMRE) and breaches of Miller’s bound revealed that the amplitude of multisensory integration was larger in the cued location than in the uncued location. However, the audiovisual O-IOR effect size was much less than that of the visual O-IOR in single visual modality selective attention in Experiment 2. 

Under situations of oculomotor system activation, implications for the influence of multisensory integration on O-IOR were examined, putting fresh insight into the two-component hypothesis of IOR.

Reference:jov.arvojournals.org/article.aspx?articleid=2778677

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