Temporal ambiguity of onsets in a cueing task prevents facilitation but not inhibition of return

Cueing effects, i.e., early facilitation of reaction time and inhibition of return (IOR), are well-established and robust phenomena characterizing exogenous orienting and are widely observed in experiments with a traditional Posner cueing paradigm. Krüger, MacInnes, and Hunt (2014) proposed that facilitatory effects of peripheral cues are the result of a cue-target perceptual merging due to re-entrant visual processing. To test the role and timing of these feedback mechanisms in peripheral cueing effects, we modified the traditional cueing task in Experiments 1-3 by interleaving pre- and post-cue trials at the valid and invalid location and random cue-target onset asynchrony (CTOA) ranging from −300 to +1,000 ms. Analysis of the manual reaction time distribution over CTOA showed well-pronounced IOR in the valid pre-cue condition and a small cost of perceptual merging in the post-cue condition, but no early facilitation of reaction time was observed in the pre-cue condition. In Experiment 4, we tested directly whether temporal ambiguity eliminated facilitation by restricting CTOAs to only the pre-cue time range and including a between-subject manipulation of a) random, b) mixed discrete, and c) blocked discrete CTOAs. Results obtained in the continuous and binned conditions showed no facilitation but robust IOR. We found both early facilitation and IOR in the blocked condition. Overall, the present findings show a small perceptual merging result without accompanying facilitation, suggesting different underlying mechanisms. Second, they demonstrate that early facilitation is likely to be affected by the presence or absence of temporal expectations and that the early onset of IOR might be masked by stronger facilitation in traditional cueing experiments.