Cognitive and Experimental Psychology, Institute of Psychology, RWTH Aachen University, Aachen, Germany.
Department for Developmental Psychology, Institute of Psychology, Goethe-University Frankfurt, Theodor-W.-Adorno-Platz 6, 60323, Frankfurt am Main, Germany.
Psychol Res. 2023 Oct;87(7):2228-2237. doi: 10.1007/s00426-023-01796-x. Epub 2023 Feb 15.
We used a variant of cued auditory task switching to investigate task preparation and its relation to response-set overlap. Previous studies found increased interference with overlapping response sets across tasks relative to non-overlapping motor response sets. In the present experiments, participants classified either pitch or loudness of a simple tone as low or high, hence, both tasks were constructed around common underlying integrated semantic categories ranging from low to high. Manual responses overlapped in both category and modality for both tasks in Experiment 1A, whereas each task was related to a specific response category and response modality (manual vs. vocal) in Experiment 1B. Focusing on the manual responses in both experiments, the data showed that non-overlapping response sets (Experiment 1B) resulted in a decreased congruency effect, suggesting reduced response-based crosstalk and thus better task shielding, but at the same time switch costs were increased, suggesting less efficient switching between task sets. Moreover, varying preparation time (cue-stimulus interval, CSI) showed that long CSI led to better performance overall. Our results thus suggest that when non-overlapping response sets share common semantic categories across tasks, there is no general benefit over overlapping response sets.
我们使用一种提示听觉任务转换的变体来研究任务准备及其与反应集重叠的关系。以前的研究发现，相对于非重叠的运动反应集，在任务之间具有重叠的反应集时会出现更大的干扰。在本实验中，参与者将简单音调的音高或响度分类为低或高，因此，两个任务都是围绕从低到高的共同潜在综合语义类别构建的。在实验 1A 中，两个任务的手动反应在类别和模态上都重叠，而在实验 1B 中，每个任务都与特定的反应类别和反应模态（手动与声音）相关。在这两个实验中都专注于手动反应，数据表明非重叠的反应集（实验 1B）导致了一致性效应的降低，这表明基于反应的串扰减少，因此任务屏蔽更好，但同时转换成本增加，表明在任务集之间的切换效率较低。此外，变化的准备时间（提示-刺激间隔，CSI）表明长 CSI 总体上导致更好的性能。因此，我们的结果表明，当非重叠的反应集在任务之间共享共同的语义类别时，重叠的反应集并没有带来普遍的好处。
