Uncovering evidence for the inhibition of return effect in the….docx

UNCOVERING EVIDENCE FOR THE INHIBITION OF RETURN EFFECT IN THE NON-SPATIAL DOMAINUNCOVERING EVIDENCE FOR THE INHIBITION OF RETURN EFFECT IN THE NON-SPATIAL DOMAINBY ADAM J. SPADARO, B.ScA Thesis Submitted to the School of Graduate Studies in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree Doctor of PhilosophyMcMaster University ? By Adam J. Spadaro, October 2014DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY (2014) McMaster University(Psychology, Neuroscience & Behaviour) Hamilton, OntarioTITLE: UNCOVERING EVIDENCE FOR THE INHIBITION OF RETURN EFFECT IN THE NON-SPATIAL DOMAINAUTHOR: Adam J. Spadaro, B.Sc. (McMaster University)SUPERVISOR: Dr. Bruce Milliken, Ph.D.NUMBER OF PAGES: xix, 246ABSTRACTOur attentional system has the remarkable ability to allow familiar contexts to guide attentional orienting, while still retaining the ability to orient rapidly to novelty in our environment. Many cognitive paradigms have been used to investigate the particular process that is responsible for orienting attention to novel events, but each paradigm has produced a unique set of boundary conditions. One such paradigm has studied an effect labelled Inhibition of Return (IOR), which has been argued to tap into an attentional mechanism that rapidly orients attention to novelty, but only in the spatial domain. The IOR effect was initially taken as evidence of a fundamental difference between spatial attentional orienting and non-spatial attentional orienting. However, there were a small number of early studies that questionedthe view that the IOR effect can only be observed in the spatial domain.In this dissertation, I built upon the evidence for non-spatial IOR by uncovering the effect using a Target-Target (TT) procedure. Although a number of prior studies had failed to observe non-spatial IOR using a TT procedure, I was able to uncover non-spatial IOR effects using a TT procedure by introducing an intervening event. The IOR-like effect that was uncovered using this procedure was labelled the in