Institute of Psychology, University of Würzburg, Röntgenring 11, 97070, Würzburg, Germany.
Institute of Psychology, RWTH Aachen University, Aachen, Germany.
Mem Cognit. 2022 Oct;50(7):1563-1577. doi: 10.3758/s13421-022-01287-1. Epub 2022 Feb 23.
In task-switching studies, performance is typically worse in task-switch trials than in task-repetition trials. These switch costs are often asymmetrical, a phenomenon that has been explained by referring to a dominance of one task over the other. Previous studies also indicated that response modalities associated with two tasks may be considered as integral components for defining a task set. However, a systematic assessment of the role of response modalities in task switching is still lacking: Are some response modalities harder to switch to than others? The present study systematically examined switch costs when combining tasks that differ only with respect to their associated effector systems. In Experiment 1, 16 participants switched (in unpredictable sequence) between oculomotor and vocal tasks. In Experiment 2, 72 participants switched (in pairwise combinations) between oculomotor, vocal, and manual tasks. We observed systematic performance costs when switching between response modalities under otherwise constant task features and could thereby replicate previous observations of response modality switch costs. However, we did not observe any substantial switch-cost asymmetries. As previous studies using temporally overlapping dual-task paradigms found substantial prioritization effects (in terms of asymmetric costs) especially for oculomotor tasks, the present results suggest different underlying processes in sequential task switching than in simultaneous multitasking. While more research is needed to further substantiate a lack of response modality switch-cost asymmetries in a broader range of task switching situations, we suggest that task-set representations related to specific response modalities may exhibit rapid decay.
在任务转换研究中，任务转换试验的表现通常比任务重复试验差。这些转换成本通常是不对称的，这种现象可以通过一种任务对另一种任务的主导来解释。以前的研究还表明，与两个任务相关的反应模式可以被认为是定义任务集的基本组成部分。然而，对反应模式在任务转换中的作用的系统评估仍然缺乏：某些反应模式是否比其他模式更难转换？本研究系统地考察了在仅与相关效应器系统不同的任务相结合时的转换成本。在实验 1 中，16 名参与者在眼动和发声任务之间（不可预测地）进行转换。在实验 2 中，72 名参与者在眼动、发声和手动任务之间（成对组合）进行转换。当任务特征不变而反应模式发生变化时，我们观察到系统的性能成本，从而复制了以前关于反应模式转换成本的观察结果。然而，我们没有观察到任何实质性的转换成本不对称。由于先前使用时间重叠的双重任务范式的研究发现了显著的优先化效应（以不对称成本的形式），特别是对于眼动任务，因此本研究结果表明，顺序任务转换的潜在过程与同时进行的多任务不同。虽然需要更多的研究来进一步证实在更广泛的任务转换情况下缺乏反应模式转换成本不对称，但我们认为与特定反应模式相关的任务集表示可能会迅速衰减。
