Crump Matthew J C, Logan Gordon D
Department of Psychology, Vanderbilt University, 633 Wilson Hall, 111 21st Ave. South, Nashville, TN 37203, USA.
Atten Percept Psychophys. 2010 Nov;72(8):2047-53. doi: 10.3758/bf03196681.
Contextual cues signaling task likelihood or the likelihood of task repetition are known to modulate the size of switch costs. We follow up on the finding by Leboe, Wong, Crump, and Stobbe (2008) that location cues predictive of the proportion of switch or repeat trials modulate switch costs. Their design employed one cue per task, whereas our experiment employed two cues per task, which allowed separate assessment of modulations to the cue-repetition benefit, a measure of lower level cue-encoding processes, and to the task-alternation cost, a measure of higher level processes representing task-set information. We demonstrate that location information predictive of switch proportion modulates performance at the level of task-set representations. Furthermore, we demonstrate that contextual control occurs even when subjects are unaware of the associations between context and switch likelihood. We discuss the notion that contextual information provides rapid, unconscious control over the extent to which prior task-set representations are retrieved in the service of guiding online performance.
已知指示任务可能性或任务重复可能性的情境线索会调节切换成本的大小。我们对勒博、王、克伦普和斯托贝（2008年）的研究发现进行了跟进，即预测切换或重复试验比例的位置线索会调节切换成本。他们的设计每个任务使用一个线索，而我们的实验每个任务使用两个线索，这使得能够分别评估对线索重复益处（一种较低水平线索编码过程的度量）和任务交替成本（一种代表任务集信息的较高水平过程的度量）的调节。我们证明，预测切换比例的位置信息会在任务集表征水平上调节表现。此外，我们证明即使受试者没有意识到情境与切换可能性之间的关联，情境控制也会发生。我们讨论了这样一种观点，即情境信息会对为指导在线表现而检索先前任务集表征的程度提供快速、无意识的控制。
