EVENT: "Looking back...": Inhibition of return and the statistics of the environment

The resolution of the human visual system is limited and humans sample visual information from their world in discrete snapshots, by successively moving the eyes. One well known finding is that people are slow to move their eyes back to a location they have looked at just previously. This “inhibition of return” (IOR) has been argued to be adaptive, as this is more likely to provide new information that would not have been obtained from previous eye movements. I will talk about recent work in which we have considered IOR in the framework of models of saccadic decision-making, and considered how IOR might adapt to the statistics of the environment. Our results suggest that two separate mechanisms are shaped to fit the statistics of the environment, and that the adaptation of IOR to the environment is partly driven by contextual learning of the temporal statistics associated with particular environments.