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 After several successive trials, this initial inhibitory bias was superseded by expectancy-based biases associated with "predictable" inter-trial patterns of location repeats or location changes, in some cases leading to faster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.

中文翻译：

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从交替到重复：在选择反应时间任务中，空间注意力偏差会导致顺序影响。

观察者在视觉目标出现在最近被刺激的位置时，比在视野中出现在新位置的响应通常要花费更长的时间。这种行为障碍-被称为回报抑制（IOR）-通过与事件选择相关的事件相关电位（ERP）组件N2pc的减少而得到反映。总之，这些发现表明，IOR的潜在机制使隐性注意力偏向于不重访最近就诊的地点。本研究的目的是确定这种抑制性注意力偏向在两次项目搜索任务的连续试验中如何演变。最初，出现在先前就诊地点的目标与行为IOR和N2pc的减少相关。经过几次连续的试验，最初的抑制性偏差被与位置重复或位置变化的“可预测”试验间模式相关的基于期望的偏差所取代，在某些情况下，当目标位置重复时，响应速度更快，N2pc更大（便于返回）。这些结果提供了证据，表明隐秘部署的偏见会根据最近的选择历史动态更新，并有助于在序列选择反应时间任务中众所周知的顺序效应。