Abstract
This report presents data from two versions of the task switching procedure in which the separate influence of stimulus repetitions, response key repetitions, conceptual response repetitions, cue repetitions, task repetitions, and congruency are considered. Experiment 1 used a simple alternating runs procedure with parity judgments of digits and consonant/vowel decisions of letters as the two tasks. Results revealed sizable effects of stimulus and response repetitions, and controlling for these effects reduced the switch cost. Experiment 2 was a cued version of the task switch paradigm with parity and magnitude judgments of digits as the two tasks. Results again revealed large effects of stimulus and response repetitions, in addition to cue repetition effects. Controlling for these effects again reduced the switch cost. Congruency did not interact with our novel “unbiased” measure of switch costs. We discuss how the task switch paradigm might be thought of as a more complex version of the feature integration paradigm and propose an episodic learning account of the effect. We further consider to what extent appeals to higher-order control processes might be unnecessary and propose that controls for feature integration biases should be standard practice in task switching experiments.
Highlights
Mental flexibility is a hallmark of executive functioning [1,2,3]
We argue that it is critical to take into consideration the basic learning and memory biases that may confound analyses aimed to assess higher-order cognitive control processes in order to prevent false confidence that control is producing an effect
Our integrative approach demonstrates that it is important to consider all sources of feature integration biases concurrently in order to obtain a truly-unbiased measure of the task switch cost
Summary
Mental flexibility is a hallmark of executive functioning [1,2,3]. That is, our ability to shift our thinking from one concept to another is deemed a crucial aspect of higher-order cognitive functioning. It is known that the repetition of stimulus or response features can have a considerable effect on performance [4, 5]. These repetition effects can often represent confounds in “cognitive control” tasks (e.g., proportion congruent and congruency sequence tasks), because they are often not distributed among the various conditions in an experiment (e.g., [6]). It has been argued that one supposed cognitive control phenomenon, the congruency sequence effect, might be explained by unintentional confounding of feature repetitions in the task [7,8,9] (for a review, see [10])
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