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The role of task rules and stimulus–response mappings in the task switching paradigm

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Abstract

Switch costs occur whenever participants are asked to switch between two or more task sets. In a typical task switching experiment, participants have to switch between two task sets composed of up to four different stimuli per task set. These 2 (task sets) × 4 (stimuli) contain only 8 different stimulus–response (S–R) mappings, and the question is why participants base their task performance on task sets instead of S–R mappings. The current experiments compared task performance based on task rules with performance based on single stimulus–response mappings. Participants were led to learn eight different S–R mappings with or without foreknowledge about two underlying task sets. Without task set information no difference between shifts and repetitions occurred, whereas introducing task sets at the beginning led to significant switch costs. Most importantly, introducing task sets in the middle of the experiment also resulted in significant switch costs. Furthermore, introducing task rules at the beginning of the experiment lead to slower RTs when simple stimuli (Experiment 1) had to be processed. This detrimental effect disappeared with more complex stimuli (Experiment 2). Results will be discussed with respect to cognitive control.

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Notes

  1. We can rule out that this effect is simply due to some unusually slow participants in the Early group. Excluding the five slowest participants from the analysis does not alter the results: the main effect of the factor Information condition remains significant as do all other main effects and interactions.

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Acknowledgements

We thank Romy Müller for running the experiments and Thomas Kleinsorge and one anonymous reviewer for helpful comments on an earlier version of this paper.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Institute of Psychology I, Dresden University of Technology, 01062, Dresden, Germany

    Gesine Dreisbach & Thomas Goschke

  2. University of Cologne, Cologne, Germany

    Hilde Haider

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  1. Gesine Dreisbach
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  2. Thomas Goschke
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  3. Hilde Haider
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Correspondence to Gesine Dreisbach.

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Dreisbach, G., Goschke, T. & Haider, H. The role of task rules and stimulus–response mappings in the task switching paradigm. Psychological Research 71, 383–392 (2007). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00426-005-0041-3

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