Kleinsorge Thomas, Scheil Juliane
Leibniz Research Centre for Working Environment and Human Factors Dortmund, Germany.
Front Psychol. 2016 Mar 22;7:396. doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2016.00396. eCollection 2016.
We compared the effects of guessing vs. choosing an upcoming task. In a task-switching paradigm with four tasks, two groups of participants were asked to either guess or choose which task will be presented next under otherwise identical conditions. The upcoming task corresponded to participants' guesses or choices in 75 % of the trials. However, only participants in the Choosing condition were correctly informed about this, whereas participants in the Guessing condition were told that tasks were determined at random. In the Guessing condition, we replicated previous findings of a pronounced reduction of switch costs in case of incorrect guesses. This switch cost reduction was considerably less pronounced with denied choices in the Choosing condition. We suggest that in the Choosing condition, the signaling of prediction errors associated with denied choices is attenuated because a certain proportion of denied choices is consistent with the overall representation of the situation as conveyed by task instructions. In the Guessing condition, in contrast, the mismatch of guessed and actual task is resolved solely on the level of individual trials by strengthening the representation of the actual task.
我们比较了猜测与选择即将到来的任务的效果。在一个有四项任务的任务切换范式中，两组参与者被要求在其他条件相同的情况下，要么猜测要么选择接下来将呈现的任务。在75%的试验中，即将到来的任务与参与者的猜测或选择相符。然而，只有选择条件组的参与者被告知这一点，而猜测条件组的参与者被告知任务是随机确定的。在猜测条件下，我们重复了之前的研究结果，即在猜错的情况下切换成本会显著降低。在选择条件下，当选择被否定时，这种切换成本的降低就不那么明显了。我们认为，在选择条件下，与被否定的选择相关的预测误差信号会减弱，因为一定比例的被否定选择与任务指令所传达的整体情境表征是一致的。相比之下，在猜测条件下，猜测任务与实际任务的不匹配仅通过强化实际任务的表征在单个试验层面上得到解决。
