Inhibition of return at different eccentricities in the visual field share the same temporal window.

Neurobiological and psychophysical evidence indicates a functional subdivision of the human visual field with a border at approximately 10-15° eccentricity. Recent support for this inhomogeneity comes from an attention study on inhibition of return (IOR), which shows a much stronger IOR effect in the periphery relative to the perifoveal visual field (Bao & Pöppel [1]). Is this inhomogeneity of the visual field also reflected in the temporal dynamics of IOR? To answer this question, we examined when IOR effects disappear at the two functional regions of the visual field. Consistent with previous observations, IOR is much stronger in the periphery relative to the perifoveal visual field, but the two decay functions reach threshold at approximately the same time. This observation suggests a common temporal control window for IOR in both perifoveal and peripheral visual fields.