Repetition costs in task switching are not equal to cue switching costs: evidence from a cue-independent context

Abstract

Recent task-switching studies highlighted the presence of feature binding processes. These studies documented that even a task-irrelevant feature (the context, henceforth) may be bound with the task and the response in each trial. When the context repeated in the following trial, it supposedly retrieved the bound features, causing benefits when the task and the response repeated and costs otherwise (i.e. full repetition benefits). In the present study, we aim to rule out an alternative explanation for such full repetition benefits in task switching. These benefits were observed in studies that used a cue-related context so that full repetition conditions always implied a cue repetition. Therefore, these full repetition benefits may be ascribed to the priming of cue encoding, instead of the binding of the context. In the present study, we implemented a similar context manipulation but used univalent target stimuli and did not present any cue. Hence, the varying context was never cue-related. We still found full repetition benefits but only when the context appeared before the target and not when they appeared simultaneously. Thus, full repetition benefits can be observed in the absence of priming of cue encoding. However, the context must occupy a prominent position (i.e. at the beginning of the trial). These results, therefore, reinforce the hypothesis that full repetition benefits stem from binding processes that take place on a trial-by-trial basis and involve both task-relevant (the task and the response) and task-irrelevant features (the context).