Abstract
Models of action control assume that attentional control settings regulate the processing of lower-level stimulus/response representations. Yet, little is known about how exactly control and sensory/response representations relate to each other to produce goal-directed behavior. Addressing this question requires time-resolved information about the strength of the different, potentially overlapping representations, on a trial-by-trial basis. Using a cued task-switching paradigm, we show that information about relevant representations can be extracted through decoding analyses from the scalp electrophysiological signal (EEG) with high temporal resolution. Peaks in representational strength—indexed through decoding accuracy—proceeded from superficial task cues, to stimulus locations, to features/responses. In addition, attentional-set representations were prominent throughout almost the entire processing cascade. Trial-by-trial analyses provided detailed information about when and to what degree different representations predict performance, with attentional settings emerging as a strong and consistent predictor of within-individual and across-individual variability in performance. Also, the strength of attentional sets was related to target representations early in the post-stimulus period and to feature/response representations at a later period, suggesting control of successive, lower-level representations in a concurrent manner. These results demonstrate a powerful approach towards uncovering different stages of information processing and their relative importance for performance.
Highlights
Models of action control assume that attentional control settings regulate the processing of lower-level stimulus/response representations
Given the spatial separation between targets and distractors, participants could use spatial attention to reduce or even eliminate stimulus-induced, between-task interference, which is critical for obtaining large task-switch costs[33]
When people need to respond to a given stimulus in a flexible, context-dependent manner, the flow of information processing cannot rely on sensory or response representations alone
Summary
Models of action control assume that attentional control settings regulate the processing of lower-level stimulus/response representations. The strength of attentional sets was related to target representations early in the post-stimulus period and to feature/response representations at a later period, suggesting control of successive, lower-level representations in a concurrent manner. These results demonstrate a powerful approach towards uncovering different stages of information processing and their relative importance for performance. For the Orientation task, participants attended the orientation singleton and responded whether the line tilted to the left or to the right In this situation, successful performance requires lower-level representations of the task cue, of the target location, and of the task-relevant feature/response. Task-level information emerged concurrently with cue information, but increased dramatically as stimulus and response choice information was processed during the entire response phase
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