Institute of Neuroscience and Psychology, University of Glasgow, Glasgow, UK.
Depress Anxiety. 2012 Sep;29(9):807-15. doi: 10.1002/da.21911. Epub 2012 Feb 3.
Inhibition of return (IOR) is thought to reflect inhibition of previously attended but irrelevant stimuli. Deficient IOR would increase the likelihood of revisiting previously searched locations or objects, thus leading to unproductive perseverations.
Therefore, using a novel IOR task, we investigated whether high scoring checkers attentional biases to threat would result in dysfunctional inhibitory functioning compared to low checkers. In two tasks, we compared 53 subclinical high and 49 low checkers regarding IOR effects for stimuli that were concordant with the concerns of high but not of low checkers (electrical kitchen appliances: e.g., toaster, kettle). The difference between the two tasks was the cueing procedure. In one task, an appliance was switched "ON" and "OFF" as an unpredictive cue, drawing attention to the functionality of the stimulus.
In this task, IOR was specifically attenuated in high checkers. In the other task, however, the cue was more abstract in form of a yellow outline that appeared around one of two appliances. Although the appliance was either "ON" or "OFF," this did not seem to matter and high checkers revealed a typical IOR pattern similar to low checkers.
We conclude that IOR mechanisms might not be generally deficient in high checkers; rather only when attention is drawn to the threatening aspects of ecologically valid stimuli, then disengagement of attention is deficient in high checkers. We make suggestions on how our task-specific findings may inform cognitive interventions that target attentional control in the treatment of checking/obsessive-compulsive disorder.
返回抑制（IOR）被认为反映了对先前注意但不相关刺激的抑制。IOR 缺陷会增加重新访问先前搜索过的位置或物体的可能性，从而导致无效的坚持。
因此，我们使用一种新的 IOR 任务，研究了高得分的国际象棋选手对威胁的注意力偏向是否会导致与低得分的国际象棋选手相比，功能失调的抑制功能。在两个任务中，我们比较了 53 名亚临床高得分的国际象棋选手和 49 名低得分的国际象棋选手，比较了与高得分的国际象棋选手的担忧一致但与低得分的国际象棋选手的担忧不一致的刺激的 IOR 效应（电器：例如，烤面包机、水壶）。两个任务的区别在于提示程序。在一个任务中，电器作为不可预测的提示被“打开”和“关闭”，吸引了对刺激功能的注意。
在这个任务中，高得分的国际象棋选手的 IOR 明显减弱。然而，在另一个任务中，提示的形式更加抽象，是一个黄色的轮廓出现在两个电器之一的周围。尽管电器是“打开”还是“关闭”，这似乎并不重要，高得分的国际象棋选手表现出类似于低得分的国际象棋选手的典型 IOR 模式。
我们的结论是，IOR 机制在高得分的国际象棋选手身上可能不是普遍缺陷的；只有当注意力被吸引到生态有效刺激的威胁方面时，高得分的国际象棋选手的注意力脱离才会出现缺陷。我们就如何使我们的任务特定发现可能为以认知控制为目标的认知干预提供信息，以治疗检查/强迫症提出了建议。
