The role of inhibition in the processing of peripheral cues

The present study investigated the role of inhibition in peripheral cueing by nonpredictive cues. Based on past findings, we investigated the possibility that inhibition of learned irrelevant cue colors is typical of short cue-target intervals, with more competition for attention capture between cue versus target. In line with the expectation, in a modified contingent-capture protocol, with short cue-target intervals, we found same-location costs (SLCs) - that is, disadvantages for validly cued targets (cue = target position) compared to invalidly cued targets (cue ≠ target position) with consistently colored non-matching cues. In contrast, no such effects for inconsistently colored non-matching cues were observed with short intervals. In a control condition, with longer intervals, the differences between consistently and inconsistently colored cues were no longer observed. We argue that this effect is due to participants proactively inhibiting consistently colored non-matching cues with short intervals but not with long intervals, but that inhibition failed with inconsistently colored non-matching cues that could take on different possible colors. Alternative explanations in terms of object-updating costs or masking were ruled out. We conclude that the currently found type of inhibition of peripheral cues most likely reflected the limitation of proactively established control structures that could be used at the same time.