BACKGROUND Preterm birth (PB) and fetal growth restriction (FGR) convey the highest risk of perinatal mortality and morbidity, as well as increasing the chance of developing chronic disease in later life. Identifying early in pregnancy the unfavourable maternal conditions that can predict poor birth outcomes could help their prevention and management. Here we used an exploratory metabolic profi...

Inhibition of return (IOR) refers to a bias against overt and covert attentional orienting toward previously attended locations. According to the reorienting hypothesis, IOR is generated when attention is withdrawn from the attended location and is prevented from "returning" to it. The present study investigated whether maintenance of attention at the cued location could affect the inhibition o...

Inhibition of return (IOR), a performance decrement for stimuli appearing at recently cued locations, occurs when the target and cue share the same screen position. This is in contrast to cue-based attention facilitation effects that were recently suggested to be mapped in a retinotopic reference frame, the prevailing representation throughout early visual processing stages. Here, we investigat...

People are slow to react to objects that appear at recently attended locations. This delay-known as inhibition of return (IOR)-is believed to aid search of the visual environment by discouraging inspection of recently inspected objects. However, after two decades of research, there is no evidence that IOR reflects an inhibition in the covert deployment of attention. Here, observers participated...

The view persists that the inhibition of return (IOR) and the spatial negative priming (SNP) phenomena may be produced by a common “orientation inhibition” mechanism (e.g., Christie & Klein, 2001), held to arise during the processing of peripherally delivered (parafoveal) visual events. Both IOR and SNP effects are present when responding to recently to-be-ignored distractor events is delayed. ...

Oculomotor inhibition of return (IOR) is believed to facilitate scene scanning by decreasing the probability that gaze will return to a previously fixated location. This "foraging" hypothesis was tested during scene search and in response to sudden-onset probes at the immediately previous (one-back) fixation location. The latencies of saccades landing within 1º of the previous fixation location...

Inhibition of return (IOR) refers to the finding that targets appearing at previously cued locations are more slowly responded to than targets appearing at previously uncued locations when a relatively long temporal interval occurs between the cue and target. This experiment was conducted to determine whether the magnitude of IOR is influenced by the type of preceding trial (cued or uncued) and...

We report a study that examined whether inhibition of return (IOR) is specific to visual search or a general characteristic of visual behavior. Participants were shown a series of scenes and were asked to (a) search each scene for a target, (b) memorize each scene, (c) rate how pleasant each scene was, or (d) view each scene freely. An examination of saccadic reaction times to probes provided e...

The present study shows that inhibition-of-return reduces competition for selection within the oculomotor system. We examined the effect of a distractor when it was presented at an inhibited location (IOR). The results show that due to IOR distractors cause less interference. This was evident in all three measures. First, there was less oculomotor capture when a distractor was presented at an i...

The present study investigated whether the direction of visual signals is influenced independently by two automatic visual orienting phenomena: orienting to a gazed-at location and inhibition of return (IOR) to the location of an abrupt onset. A schematic face served as both a nonpredictive gaze direction cue and an abrupt onset cue. Results indicated that target detection was facilitated at th...