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Evidence for instructions-based updating of task-set representations: the informed fadeout effect

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Abstract

The cognitive system can be updated rapidly and efficiently to maximize performance in cognitive tasks. This paper used a task-switching task to explore updating at the level of the plausible task-sets held for future performance. Previous research suggested a “fadeout effect”, performance improvement when moving from task-switching context to single-task context, yet this effect could reflect passive learning rather than intentional control. In a novel “informed fadeout paradigm”, one of two tasks was canceled for a certain number of trials and participants were informed or uninformed regarding task cancelation. The “informed fadeout effect” indicates better performance in the informed than uninformed fadeout after one informed trial had been executed. However, the results regarding the first trial were inconclusive. Possible underlying mechanisms are discussed.

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Notes

  1. We wish to thank Michael Ziessler, for reviewing this paper and suggesting this baseline.

  2. The differentiation between the first and the more advanced trials was based on preliminary results that are reported in the Supplementary Materials S1 and S2, and also uses to test for a specific expected pattern.

  3. Two preliminary experiments are reported in the Supplementary materials, both showing an informed fadeout effect—improved RT from the second informed trial relative to the uninformed condition. According to their results we decided to (a) use a constant fadeout length (Experiment S1) and (b) place the informed condition at the end of trial-blocks (Experiment S2).

  4. The trend in PE was very noisy, and if anything showed an average increase in PE.

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Acknowledgements

We would like to thank Yoav Kessler for inspiring Experiment 3, and Gal Berger, Nitsan Dolev, Aylon Fisch, Eran Halavy, Dan Halunga and Shiri Omer for their help in data collection.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Psychology and Zlotowski Center for Neuroscience, Ben-Gurion University of the Negev, 8410501, Beer-Sheva, Israel

    Maayan Pereg & Nachshon Meiran

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  1. Maayan Pereg
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  2. Nachshon Meiran
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Correspondence to Maayan Pereg.

Ethics declarations

This research was supported by a research grant from the USA–Israel Bi-national Science Foundation to the second author. The first author declares she has no conflict of interest. The second author declares he has no conflict of interest.

All procedures performed in this study involving human participants were in accordance with the ethical standards of the institutional research committee. Informed consent was obtained from all individual participants included in the study.

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Supplementary material 1 (DOCX 79 KB)

Appendices

Appendix: Task-rule congruency effect (TRCE)

The Task-Rule Congruency Effect (TRCE) might help understanding the mechanism at the basis of the informed-fadeout effect. In short, if the informed fadeout includes the removal of the irrelevant task set from WM, it should not interfere with the relevant task, and thus not cause TRCE. Nonetheless, TRCE is considered to be based on two structures—both activated long-term memory (A-LTM), consisting of all the task-relevant representations, that would not be eliminated during a short-fadeout; and residual bindings in the bridge, which only holds the currently relevant task rules (Oberauer et al., 2013; see also; Kiesel, Wendt, & Peters, 2007). Below, we present results involving Congruency in the three experiments presented in this study. Since there were generally no consistent results regarding TRCE, we pooled the three experiments to increase statistical power (Experiment was entered as a between-subjects independent variable, and we used the lowest common denominator and included four trials within the fadeout sequence, and the short-informed condition from Experiment 2 (which was more comparable to the other experiments)). The results do not show an informed fadeout effect in TRCE.

Results and discussion

Importantly, none of the interactions with Congruency reached significance, including the interactions between Congruency and Experiment (suggesting that the TRCE patterns were not different between the experiments). We took the same set of planned comparisons as in the Results sections and added Congruency. In RT, none of the comparisons approached significance (all Fs < 0.86, ps > 0.35) (see Fig. 9).

However, some of the comparisons in PE reached significance. In the informed condition, a significant reduction in PE-TRCE was found between baseline and Trial 1 (by 4% erros) [F(1,79) = 6.40, p = .01, MSE = 0.007, Ƞ2 p = 0.07], and this trend was significantly different than the uninformed condition [F(1,79) = 5.49, p = .02, MSE = 0.007, Ƞ2 p = 0.06]. However, this result seems to stem from an increase in PE in congruent trials [F(1,79) = 15.88, p < .001, MSE = 0.002, Ƞ2 p = 0.17] and not from a decrease in PE in incongruent trials [F(1,79) = 1.71, p = .19, MSE = 0.011, Ƞ2 p = 0.02]. Other effects nearly approaching significance were the difference in PE-TRCE in Trial 1 between the fadeout conditions (which was higher in the informed condition by 3.36% errors) [F(1,79) = 3.39, p = .07, MSE = 0.006, Ƞ2 p = 0.04]; the difference in PE-TRCE in Trials 2–4 between the fadeout conditions [F(1,79) = 3.08, p = .08, MSE = 0.005, Ƞ2 p = 0.04]. Other than these trends, none of the other comparisons approached significance [all Fs < 2.07, ps > 0.15].

Importantly, a significant TRCE was found in Trials 2–4 in both RT [F(1,78) = 4.45, p = .04, MSE = 6,678.08, Ƞ2 p = 0.05] and PE [F(1,79) = 7.66, p < .01, MSE = 0.005, Ƞ2 p = 0.09].

The consistent TRCE in both RT and PE seen in the informed fadeout condition indicates that the irrelevant task was not removed from WM. Nonetheless, it is still possible that there was removal of information from the limited-capacity bridge part, holding procedural information, though not from A-LTM. Such a scenario predicts that TRCE would still emerge.

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Pereg, M., Meiran, N. Evidence for instructions-based updating of task-set representations: the informed fadeout effect. Psychological Research 82, 549–569 (2018). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00426-017-0842-1

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