We have a new preprint on bioRxiv titled: “Time-locked inhibition of covert orienting” were we look at inhibitory processes during covert orienting in the absence of saccades.

In this project, we were interested to study if a similar phenomenon of the well-known Saccadic Inhibition (Reingold & Stampe, 2002; Buonocore & McIntosh, 2008) can also affect covert orienting and consequently altering visual discrimination. To do so, we combined a classic task for the exogenous cueing of covert attention (Posner, 1980) with a saccadic inhibition paradigm (Buonocore et al., 2017), to create a novel covert orienting task suitable for testing the inhibitory influence of an irrelevant visual transient.

Interestingly, we find a SI-like time-specific covert inhibition effect in which the irrelevant flash impaired orientation discrimination accuracy only when the cue preceded the probe by about 200 ms.

The preprint is available on bioRxiv here and the entire dataset after preprocessing is freely available on the Open Science Framework here. Go and check it out!