Zivi Pierpaolo, Zigrino Anna, Couyoumdjian Alessandro, Ferlazzo Fabio, Sdoia Stefano
Department of Psychology, Sapienza University of Rome, Rome, Italy.
Front Psychol. 2024 Feb 23;15:1308636. doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2024.1308636. eCollection 2024.
Task set inhibition supports optimal switching among tasks by actively suppressing the interference from recently executed competing task sets. It is typically studied in cued task-switching paradigms where there is no uncertainty about the task set or rule to prepare for on each trial. While inhibition has been shown to influence the speed and the accuracy of task execution, affecting task set retrieval, preparation, or implementation in conditions of task set switching, it remains uninvestigated whether it also affects rule selection under uncertainty.
We implemented an ad-hoc four-rule card sorting task and categorized the rules selected by participants after a rule shift according to the recency of their last usage. We included a measure of working memory capacity (WMC) to control for its involvement in the rule selection process.
Participants exhibited a reduced preference for recently abandoned rules than less recently abandoned ones. Furthermore, we found that such a preference was not associated with WMC.
The results suggest that decision-making processes underlying rule inference and selection may be influenced by task-set inhibition, configuring as a conflict adjustment mechanism to the sequential history of rules application.
任务集抑制通过积极抑制最近执行的竞争任务集的干扰，支持任务之间的最佳切换。它通常在提示任务切换范式中进行研究，在这种范式中，每次试验中要准备的任务集或规则不存在不确定性。虽然抑制已被证明会影响任务执行的速度和准确性，在任务集切换的情况下影响任务集检索、准备或实施，但它是否也会在不确定性条件下影响规则选择仍未得到研究。
我们实施了一项临时的四规则卡片分类任务，并根据参与者上次使用规则的近期程度，对规则转移后他们选择的规则进行分类。我们纳入了工作记忆容量（WMC）的测量，以控制其在规则选择过程中的参与度。
与最近较少放弃的规则相比，参与者对最近放弃的规则的偏好降低。此外，我们发现这种偏好与WMC无关。
结果表明，规则推理和选择背后的决策过程可能受到任务集抑制的影响，构成一种对规则应用顺序历史的冲突调整机制。
