van 't Wout Félice, Lavric Aureliu, Monsell Stephen
School of Psychology, University of Exeter.
J Exp Psychol Learn Mem Cogn. 2015 Mar;41(2):363-76. doi: 10.1037/a0038268. Epub 2014 Dec 22.
When stimuli afford multiple tasks, switching among them involves promoting one of several task-sets in play into a most-active state. This process, often conceptualized as retrieving task parameters and stimulus-response (S-R) rules into procedural working memory, is a likely source of the reaction time (RT) cost of a task-switch, especially when no time is available for task preparation before the stimulus. We report 2 task-cuing experiments that asked whether the time consumed by task-set retrieval increases with the number of task-sets in play, while unconfounding the number of tasks with their frequency and recency of use. Participants were required to switch among 3 or 5 orthogonal classifications of perceptual attributes of an object (Experiment 1) or of phonological/semantic attributes of a word (Experiment 2), with a 100 or 1,300 ms cue-stimulus interval. For 2 tasks for which recency and frequency were matched in the 3- and 5-task conditions, there was no effect of number of tasks on the switch cost. For the other tasks, there was a greater switch cost in the 5-task condition with little time for preparation, attributable to effects of frequency/recency. Thus, retrieval time for active task-sets is not influenced by the number of alternatives per se (unlike several other kinds of memory retrieval) but is influenced by recency or frequency of use.
当刺激提供多个任务时，在它们之间进行切换涉及将正在起作用的几个任务集之一提升到最活跃状态。这个过程通常被概念化为将任务参数和刺激-反应（S-R）规则检索到程序性工作记忆中，这很可能是任务切换反应时间（RT）成本的一个来源，特别是当在刺激出现之前没有时间进行任务准备时。我们报告了2个任务提示实验，这些实验探讨了任务集检索所消耗的时间是否会随着正在起作用的任务集数量的增加而增加，同时将任务数量与其使用频率和近期性区分开来。参与者被要求在物体的感知属性（实验1）或单词的语音/语义属性（实验2）的3种或5种正交分类之间进行切换，提示刺激间隔为100毫秒或1300毫秒。对于在3任务和5任务条件下近期性和频率相匹配的2个任务来说，任务数量对切换成本没有影响。对于其他任务，在准备时间很少的5任务条件下切换成本更高，这归因于频率/近期性的影响。因此，活跃任务集的检索时间本身不受替代选项数量的影响（与其他几种记忆检索不同），而是受使用的近期性或频率的影响。
