Abstract
Cues help in retrieving and implementing task-sets, that are actual representations of the to-be performed task in working memory. However, whereas previous studies revealed that the effectiveness of selecting and implementing task-sets based on cues depends on the type of cue (i.e., transparent words vs. arbitrary shapes), it is still unclear which characteristics of cues are responsible for these differences and whether the impact of the cue is bound to task-set retrieval only or also impacts task-set representations. For instance, the amount of interference during actual task performance has been reported to alter dependent on cue type as do preparation gains such as the reduction of switch cost. To investigate the effectiveness of cue characteristics (i.e., cue transparency and cue format), we manipulated those within- and between-participants in three experiments. Main dependent measures were switch costs in reaction times and error rates that occur when participants have to switch task-sets, and thus update working memory content. Our results consistently show beneficial effects of transparent cues for the reduction of switch cost. The influence of cue format was manifest in within-participants manipulation only and was mainly found in error rates. Overall, our data suggest that the amount of interference experienced in actual task performance can be significantly modulated dependent on cue type, suggesting flexible adaptation of the cognitive system to contextual information.
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Notes
In sum, per participant 27 trials were obtained for all possible within-participants’ factors (CTI, Task Transition and Cue Transparency for E1, and CTI, Task Transition and Cue Format for E2). Please note that the main interest of our study was bound to these variables and only those and their interactions will be discussed.
As we did not fully balance the number of participants for each combination of timing condition and cue format (see methods), we ran a control analysis in which we constrained our sample to be of same size for both cue formats in both timing conditions (i.e., nine participants with verbal cues and nine participants with pictorial cues in both timing conditions; the first nine participants collected for each condition were chosen) and could confirm that interactions involving format were already present in this reduced sample in RT data. To be concrete, an impact of transparency (opaque vs. transparent) depending on cue format (words vs. pictures) was already found, showing benefits of 87 ms for transparent word cues but cost of 12 ms for transparent pictorial cues, F(1, 32) = 9.50, p < .001, ηp2 = 0.23. In error rates and percentage task errors, again, no opposing trends involving the format variable were observed, for the complete reduced ANOVA see Supplemental Material.
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Acknowledgements
Research reported in this article was supported by a grant from the DFG (GA2105-2/1) to Miriam Gade. The authors would like to thank Sarah Schoch and Stefanie Ochsenkühn for their help in data collection. Raw data, trimmed data and analysis scripts can be found at Open Science Framework: https://osf.io/mm4yc/?view_only=809d07010bf54d17bfcc027145083984.
Funding
This study was funded by a grant of the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft to the first author (GA2105/2-1).
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Gade, M., Steinhauser, M. The impact of cue format and cue transparency on task switching performance. Psychological Research 84, 1346–1369 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00426-019-01150-0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s00426-019-01150-0