Inhibition of return to successively cued spatial locations: commentary on Pratt and Abrams (1995)

J. Pratt and R.A. Abrams (1995) reported that the inhibition of return of attention is found only for the most recently attended of 2 cued locations. This study does not dispute their findings, but suggests that a more ecologically valid experiment would have more than 2 possible target locations. Twelve male students participated in an experiment in which the target may occur in 1 of 4 possible locations, after 3 of those locations have been cued exogenously in sequence. Inhibition of return was found for each of the cued locations. This result suggests that inhibition may be an important mechanism for aiding visual search in complex environments.