Abstract

The experiment was aimed at assessing the presence of inhibition of return (IOR) in a discrimination task involving numbers. Participants were required to perform a parity judgment task on digits appearing 822 or 1222 milliseconds after the on-set of a peripheral uninformative cue in the same or in the opposite position. Results revealed an IOR effect and an interesting interaction showing that even a numerical semantic discrimination task is influenced by phenomena linked to spatial attention. Spatial attention manipulations that produce IOR might be useful tools for investigating the internal organization of different cognitive domains.