Abstract
An experiment is reported that investigated switching among two numerical judgment tasks with a factorial variation of the cue-to-task mapping (1:1 vs. 2:1) for each of the tasks. In addition, the precuing interval (CSI) was varied. The results suggest that with a long CSI of 1,100 ms, switching performance is almost completely determined by the task-specific conditional probability of a task switch given a cue switch. This effect probably reflects the complexity of task-rule retrieval. Without preparation (CSI = 0 ms), the complexity of cue disambiguation as a function of the number of cues across tasks seems to account for most part of the additional variance observed in this condition. The latter observation is in line with suggestions that increasing the number of cues per task from one to two introduces additional demands on the level of cue processing that reflect the transition from an isomorphic to a homomorphic mapping function.
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Notes
Analyzing only the first block of trials in terms of a between-participants variation of the cue-to-task mapping yielded basically the same pattern of results.
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Acknowledgments
Thanks to Stefan Arnau for assistance in programming and Jannis Bille for running the experiment. Additional thanks to James Grange and Andrea Philipp for their helpful comments on an earlier version of this article. The research reported in this article was supported by grant KL 1205/6-1 of the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft.
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Kleinsorge, T. Task switching with a 2:1 cue-to-task mapping: separating cue disambiguation from task-rule retrieval. Psychological Research 76, 329–335 (2012). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00426-011-0344-5
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s00426-011-0344-5