Chair of Cognitive and Experimental Psychology, Institute of Psychology, RWTH Aachen University, Jaegerstr. 17-19, 52066, Aachen, Germany.
Psychol Res. 2024 Apr;88(3):910-920. doi: 10.1007/s00426-023-01904-x. Epub 2023 Dec 19.
Recent task-switching studies highlighted the presence of feature binding processes. These studies documented that even a task-irrelevant feature (the context, henceforth) may be bound with the task and the response in each trial. When the context repeated in the following trial, it supposedly retrieved the bound features, causing benefits when the task and the response repeated and costs otherwise (i.e. full repetition benefits). In the present study, we aim to rule out an alternative explanation for such full repetition benefits in task switching. These benefits were observed in studies that used a cue-related context so that full repetition conditions always implied a cue repetition. Therefore, these full repetition benefits may be ascribed to the priming of cue encoding, instead of the binding of the context. In the present study, we implemented a similar context manipulation but used univalent target stimuli and did not present any cue. Hence, the varying context was never cue-related. We still found full repetition benefits but only when the context appeared before the target and not when they appeared simultaneously. Thus, full repetition benefits can be observed in the absence of priming of cue encoding. However, the context must occupy a prominent position (i.e. at the beginning of the trial). These results, therefore, reinforce the hypothesis that full repetition benefits stem from binding processes that take place on a trial-by-trial basis and involve both task-relevant (the task and the response) and task-irrelevant features (the context).
最近的任务转换研究强调了特征绑定过程的存在。这些研究记录表明，即使是一个与任务无关的特征（即上下文，下文同）也可能与任务和每个试验中的反应绑定。当下一个试验中重复出现上下文时，它应该会检索到绑定的特征，从而在任务和反应重复时带来好处，而在其他情况下则会带来成本（即完全重复收益）。在本研究中，我们旨在排除任务转换中完全重复收益的另一种解释。这些收益是在使用与线索相关的上下文的研究中观察到的，因此完全重复的条件总是意味着线索重复。因此，这些完全重复的收益可能归因于线索编码的启动，而不是上下文的绑定。在本研究中，我们实施了类似的上下文操作，但使用了单值目标刺激，并且没有呈现任何线索。因此，变化的上下文与线索无关。我们仍然发现了完全重复的收益，但只有在上下文出现在目标之前，而不是同时出现时才会出现。因此，即使没有线索编码的启动，也可以观察到完全重复的收益。然而，上下文必须占据突出的位置（即试验开始时）。因此，这些结果加强了这样的假设，即完全重复的收益源于基于逐个试验的绑定过程，这些过程涉及任务相关（任务和反应）和任务无关的特征（上下文）。
