Abstract
Recently, Demanet and Liefooghe (2014; Experiment 3) reported an experiment on voluntary task switching (VTS) in which the number of candidate tasks to choose from was reduced from 4 to 2 before participants indicated their task choice. This procedure was intended to prevent participants from choosing a task in advance of the presentation of a prompt to do so. This procedure is highly similar to a procedure recently employed by Kleinsorge and Scheil (2013) in a study of cued task switching which yielded evidence for a selective facilitation of task switches by a reduction of the number of tasks to two. In order to examine whether a similar effect would also be observed with VTS, we conceptually replicated the experiment of Demanet and Liefooghe (2014) with an additional control condition in which the number of tasks was not reduced. In this experiment, no evidence for a facilitation of task switching could be observed, pointing to a functional divergence between explicit task cues and the internally generated cues involved in VTS. In addition, we observed evidence for a selective advantage of forced switch trials over repetition-possible trials that was largely independent of the duration of the preparation interval. This effect was accompanied by a massive increase of task indication times in conditions with a reduced number of tasks, suggesting that this manipulation resulted in a pronounced change in the way participants performed voluntary task switches.
Highlights
Research on task switching is intimately linked to controversies regarding suitable measures of cognitive control processes
The main observation of these experiments consisted of a reduction of reaction times (RTs) induced by a reduction of the set of candidate tasks from 4 to 2 that predominantly affected switch trials. We proposed that this was due to the establishment of antagonistic constraints among the remaining two candidate tasks that would enable task selection to be based on a rather superficial processing of the task cue, compared to conditions in which selection was among four tasks that do not allow for an establishment of antagonistic constraints among the candidate tasks
In this study, we replicated the finding of Demanet and Liefooghe (2014) of a lack of evidence for top–down preparation in voluntary task switching (VTS) when participants were discouraged from choosing a task and prepare for it in advance of the task indication response
Summary
Research on task switching is intimately linked to controversies regarding suitable measures of cognitive control processes (cf. Kiesel et al, 2010; Vandierendonck et al, 2010, for reviews). Many observations obtained with this procedure as indications of top–down control have been shown to be open to alternative explanations in terms of stimulus-based, bottom–up factors (e.g., Schneider and Logan, 2005) This has led Arrington and Logan (2004, 2005) to introduce voluntary task switching (VTS) as a procedure to increase the potential influence of top–down processes. In VTS, participants are free (within certain constraints related, for example, to the proportion of task switches) to choose from a number of candidate tasks in each trial Because this procedure gets along without explicit task cues, it is easy to rule out cue-related processes that have been established as alternatives to top–down processes as an explanation for (some proportion of) switch costs
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