Kleinsorge Thomas, Scheil Juliane
Leibniz Research Centre for Working Environment and Human Factors (LG) Dortmund, Germany.
Front Psychol. 2017 Feb 28;8:290. doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2017.00290. eCollection 2017.
We investigated task switching among four tasks by means of a modified cuing procedure with two types of cues. One type of cue consisted of a standard task cue indicating the next task. In half of the trials, this task cue was preceded by another type of cue that reduced the set of candidate tasks from four to two tasks. In addition, we measured participants' spontaneous eye blink rates (EBRs) at the beginning, in the middle, and at the end of the experiment. Whereas interindividual differences in mean EBR had no pronounced effect on task switching performance, changes in EBRs during the first half of the experiment significantly modulated the interaction of the effects of the two types of cues. We suggest that changes in EBRs in the early phase of the experiment reflect adaptations of dopaminergic projections serving to integrate advance information about a forthcoming task switch.
我们通过一种改良的提示程序，利用两种类型的提示来研究四项任务之间的任务切换。一种提示由指示下一项任务的标准任务提示组成。在一半的试验中，这个任务提示之前还有另一种提示，它将候选任务集从四个减少到两个任务。此外，我们在实验开始、中间和结束时测量了参与者的自发眨眼率（EBR）。虽然平均EBR的个体间差异对任务切换表现没有显著影响，但实验前半段EBR的变化显著调节了两种提示效果之间的相互作用。我们认为，实验早期阶段EBR的变化反映了多巴胺能投射的适应性变化，这些投射有助于整合关于即将到来的任务切换的提前信息。
