Abstract
Bottom-up biases are widely thought to influence task choice in the voluntary task switching paradigm. Definitive support for this hypothesis is lacking, however, because task choice and task performance are usually confounded. We therefore revisited this hypothesis using a paradigm in which task choice and task performance are temporally separated. As predicted, participants tended to choose the task that was primed by bottom-up biases. Moreover, such choices were linked to increased switch costs during subsequent task performance. These findings provide compelling evidence that bottom-up biases influence voluntary task choice. They also suggest that succumbing to such biases reflects a reduction of top-down control that persists to influence upcoming task performance.
Highlights
Much of human behavior is thought to reflect a mixture of top-down and bottom-up processes
Task Choice Proportions The voluntary task choice data were largely consistent with prior studies of voluntary task switching
The present results make two important contributions to the literature on voluntary task switching. They unambiguously indicate that bottom-up biases influence voluntary task choice. They show that succumbing to such biases predicts reduced top-down control during task performance
Summary
Much of human behavior is thought to reflect a mixture of top-down and bottom-up processes. A mixture of such processes is present in most laboratory tasks of selective attention. Performance in the Stroop task is thought to be determined by a combination of top-down processes that bias attention toward ink color and bottom-up processes that underlie word reading (MacLeod, 1991). The locus of spatial attention in the Posner cueing paradigm is thought to depend on top-down processes that underlie voluntary orienting of attention and bottom-up processes that orient attention to salient events (Posner et al, 1980; Corbetta et al, 2008). Further developing our understanding of how top-down and bottom-up processes influence performance has become a mainstay of modern attention research
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