Institute of Sociology, Shanghai Academy of Social Sciences, Shanghai, China; School of Social Development and Public Policy, Fudan University, Shanghai, China.
School of Social Development and Public Policy, Fudan University, Shanghai, China.
Acta Psychol (Amst). 2021 Mar;214:103253. doi: 10.1016/j.actpsy.2021.103253. Epub 2021 Jan 26.
Task-switching cost is highly reliable in old participants. However, in a Stroop-switching paradigm that compared old musicians with old non-musicians (Experiment 1A), task-switching costs were not consistent. For non-musicians, the task-switching costs were significant in the congruent and neutral trials, but not in the incongruent trials. For musicians, the task-switching costs disappeared completely. We suspected that besides following task rules, old participants might also apply a stimulus-based strategy called the target-first strategy. In Experiment 1B and 2, participants in Experiment 1A were invited again to perform two more Stroop-switching paradigms. To encourage the participants to use task rules, in Experiment 1B we removed the neutral trials but found the same results as in Experiment 1A. In Experiment 2, when inserting a cue-target interval in the Stroop-switching paradigm, both musicians and non-musicians produced reliable task-switching costs in all trial conditions. Note that younger participants had reliable task-switching costs in Experiment 1B and 2. We suggest that older participants preferred the target-first strategy to the task rules-based strategy because the former was easy to implant although it was less flexible. Besides task-switching costs, we found that old musicians had less interference effect than old non-musicians in Experiment 1B. In all three experiments, old musicians had shorter RTs than old non-musicians, which might be due to differences in strategies apart from cognitive abilities. We propose that without considering the strategy preference, some previous studies might misestimate the difference between old and young participants in terms of task-switching performance and interference control.
任务转换代价在老年参与者中高度可靠。然而，在一项比较老年音乐家和老年非音乐家的斯特鲁普转换范式（实验 1A）中，任务转换代价并不一致。对于非音乐家，在一致和中性试验中，任务转换代价显著，但在不一致试验中不显著。对于音乐家，任务转换代价完全消失。我们怀疑，除了遵循任务规则之外，老年参与者可能还应用了一种基于刺激的策略，称为目标优先策略。在实验 1B 和 2 中，再次邀请实验 1A 的参与者执行另外两个斯特鲁普转换范式。为了鼓励参与者使用任务规则，在实验 1B 中，我们去除了中性试验，但发现与实验 1A 相同的结果。在实验 2 中，当在斯特鲁普转换范式中插入提示-目标间隔时，音乐家和非音乐家在所有试验条件下都产生了可靠的任务转换代价。请注意，在实验 1B 和 2 中，年轻参与者有可靠的任务转换代价。我们建议老年参与者更喜欢目标优先策略而不是基于任务规则的策略，因为前者虽然不太灵活，但易于植入。除了任务转换代价，我们还发现，在实验 1B 中，老年音乐家的干扰效应小于老年非音乐家。在所有三个实验中，老年音乐家的 RT 比老年非音乐家短，这可能是由于策略的差异，而不是认知能力的差异。我们提出，不考虑策略偏好，一些先前的研究可能会错误估计老年和年轻参与者在任务转换表现和干扰控制方面的差异。
