Abstract: To avoid the interaction between the cue and the target on the electroencephalogram (EEG) study of inhibition of return (IOR), the low-resolution electromagnetic (LORETA) algorithm is used to localize the source after an exogenous cue in this work. The results show that activations may be divided into three stages. In the early stage, activations are in the prefrontal cortex, the intraparietal cortex, and the contralateral occipito-temporal cortex. In the middle stage, activations are in the frontal cortex and the parietal cortex. In the late stage, activations are in the ipsilateral occipito-parietal cortex. These findings indicate that the generation of IOR includes two neural networks, and support that IOR is related to both attention and motor response inhibition.