Re-examining the contribution of visuospatial working memory to inhibition of return.

Castel and colleagues (Percept Psychophys 65(6):970-981, 2003) proposed that visuospatial working memory is needed to retain and update the irrelevant but attended location in an inhibition of return (IOR) procedure. In a series of three experiments, we re-examined this hypothesis by loading visuospatial working memory and manipulating the timing of encoding. When the visuospatial memory items were presented right after the cue, as in Castel et al.