From alternation to repetition: Spatial attention biases contribute to sequential effects in a choice reaction-time task

Observers often take longer to respond to a visual target when it appears at a recently stimulated location than when it appears at a new location in the visual field. This behavioral impairment — known as inhibition of return (IOR) — is mirrored by a reduction of an event-related potential (ERP) component called the N2pc that has been associated with attentional selection. Together, these findings indicate that the mechanism underlying IOR operates to bias covert attention against re-visiting the most recently attended location. The goal of the present study was to determine how this inhibitory attention bias evolves across successive trials of a two-item search task. Initially, targets appearing at previously attended locations were associated with behavioral IOR and a concomitant reduction of the N2pc. After several successive trials, this initial inhibitory bias was superseded by expectancy-based biases associated with “predictable” inter-trial patterns of location repeats or location changes, in some cases leading to faster responses and a larger N2pc when the target location repeated (facilitation of return). These results provide evidence that biases in the covert deployment of attention are updated dynamically according to the recent selection history and contribute to well-known sequential effects in serial choice reaction-time tasks.