Task selection cost asymmetry without task switching

Task selection cost asymmetry without task switching.

The switch cost asymmetry (i.e., larger costs when switching from a nondominant into a dominant task than vice versa) has been explained in terms of the trial-to-trial carryover of activation levels required for the dominant versus the nondominant task. However, there is an open question about whether an actual switch in task is in fact necessary to obtain a "selection" cost asymmetry. In Exper...

Running head: Task-Selection Cost Asymmetry without Task Switching

Task switching without knowledge of the tasks

Task-cuing paradigms are typically taken to explore control of task-set. However, they can be construed as requiring not selection of a task-set, just retrieval of a cue+stimulus->response (CSR) mapping. In this paper we considered performance in a task-cuing paradigm in which participants saw a color cue that indicated whether they should classify a digit as odd/even or high/low using one of t...

Task alternation cost without task alternation: measuring intentionality.

A behavioral dissociation between intention and action was demonstrated by patient AF who sustained damage to the left-hemisphere including the basal ganglia. The patient was tested in a task switching paradigm involving two choice reaction-time tasks: SIZE (small/large) and SHAPE (circle/square). The last block in each of the two sessions involved only one task. AF switched tasks reasonably we...

The effect of hierarchical task representations on task selection in voluntary task switching.

The current study explored the potential for hierarchical representations to influence action selection during voluntary task switching. Participants switched between 4 individual task elements. In Experiment 1, participants were encouraged to represent the task elements as grouped within a hierarchy based on experimental manipulations of varying complexity. Manipulations implemented only durin...