Strobach Tilo, Wendt Mike
Department of Psychology, Medical School Hamburg, Am Kaiserkai 1, 20457, Hamburg, Germany.
BMC Psychol. 2022 Mar 22;10(1):77. doi: 10.1186/s40359-022-00784-x.
Dual-tasking procedures often involve the successive presentation of two different stimuli, requiring participants to execute two tasks in a particular order. Performance in both tasks suffers if the order of the tasks is reversed (i.e., switched) compared to the directly preceding trial. This task-order switch cost is reduced, however, if the preceding trial itself involved a task-order switch compared to a task-order repetition (Strobach in Acta Psychol 217:103328, 2021). Theoretical accounts range from assumptions of top-down implementation of a task-order control set, or passive persistence thereof, to priming based on episodic binding of tasks and temporal positions. Here, we tested these accounts by investigating whether the sequential modulation decays as a function of the inter-trial interval.
Task-order switch costs were reliably reduced after a task-order switch (compared to after a task-order repetition) and this reduction did not decrease over inter-trial intervals ranging from 350 ms to 1,400 ms. Also replicating previous findings, for reaction times the reduction was driven by selective slowing in task-order repeat trials, suggesting increased response caution.
Our results are consistent with preparatory processes of task-order control or with episodic integration of task-order information but argue against accounts assuming short-lived, decaying task-order sets.
双重任务程序通常涉及依次呈现两种不同的刺激，要求参与者按特定顺序执行两项任务。与紧接在前的试验相比，如果任务顺序颠倒（即切换），两项任务的表现都会受到影响。然而，如果与任务顺序重复相比，前一次试验本身涉及任务顺序切换，那么这种任务顺序切换成本就会降低（施特罗巴赫，《心理学报》217:103328，2021年）。理论解释范围从任务顺序控制集的自上而下实施假设或其被动持续，到基于任务与时间位置的情景绑定的启动。在此，我们通过研究顺序调制是否作为试验间隔的函数衰减来检验这些解释。
与任务顺序重复后相比，任务顺序切换后任务顺序切换成本可靠地降低，并且在350毫秒至1400毫秒的试验间隔内，这种降低并未减少。同样重复了先前的研究结果，对于反应时间，这种降低是由任务顺序重复试验中的选择性减慢驱动的，表明反应谨慎性增加。
我们的结果与任务顺序控制的准备过程一致，或者与任务顺序信息的情景整合一致，但反对假设存在短暂、衰减的任务顺序集的解释。
