Yamaguchi Motonori, Swainson Rachel
Department of Psychology, University of Essex, Colchester, UK.
School of Psychology, University of Aberdeen, Aberdeen, UK.
Psychol Res. 2025 Mar 24;89(2):72. doi: 10.1007/s00426-025-02107-2.
A switch cost can be observed in cued task-switching on trials that follow a cue-only trial, which presents a task cue indicating a task to be performed but does not present a target stimulus to be responded to. This finding has provided important implications as to the source of the performance cost that emerges when switching tasks. However, cue-only trials differ from completed trials (for which the target occurs and is responded to) in several task parameters, and there are a few untested assumptions about a task-switch cost after cue-only trials, which restricted the conditions under which cue-only trials have been used. The present study first examined whether a switch cost emerged after cue-only trials when cue-only trials were matched with completed trials in as many task parameters as possible, and found that an expected switch cost following cue-only trials was absent in response time. In the subsequent six experiments, we explored critical task parameters to obtain a switch cost after cue-only trials. The present results indicate that the use of a short preparation interval was an important factor and that the switch cost was more short-lived and dissipated more quickly after cue-only trials than after completed trials. These outcomes are consistent with the proposal that there are at least two sources of a task-switch cost, one that originates from processing a task cue and another that originates from performing a cued task. Early processes of task preparation (e.g., cue or task identification) may be sufficient to produce the switch cost after cue-only trials, but response-related processes might generate a more persistent switch cost.
在仅提示试验之后的线索提示任务切换试验中，可以观察到切换成本。仅提示试验呈现一个指示要执行任务的任务提示，但不呈现要做出反应的目标刺激。这一发现对于任务切换时出现的表现成本的来源具有重要意义。然而，仅提示试验在几个任务参数方面与完整试验（目标出现并得到响应）不同，并且关于仅提示试验后的任务切换成本存在一些未经检验的假设，这限制了仅提示试验的使用条件。本研究首先考察了在仅提示试验与完整试验在尽可能多的任务参数上匹配时，仅提示试验后是否会出现切换成本，并发现仅提示试验后的预期切换成本在反应时间上并不存在。在随后的六个实验中，我们探索了关键任务参数，以在仅提示试验后获得切换成本。目前的结果表明，使用较短的准备间隔是一个重要因素，并且仅提示试验后的切换成本比完整试验后的切换成本持续时间更短且消散更快。这些结果与以下提议一致，即任务切换成本至少有两个来源，一个源于处理任务提示，另一个源于执行提示任务。任务准备的早期过程（例如，提示或任务识别）可能足以在仅提示试验后产生切换成本，但与反应相关的过程可能会产生更持久的切换成本。
