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Gepubliceerd in: Psychological Research 2/2007

01-03-2007 | Original Article

Task switching: on the origin of response congruency effects

Auteurs: Andrea Kiesel, Mike Wendt, Alexandra Peters

Gepubliceerd in: Psychological Research | Uitgave 2/2007

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Abstract

When people frequently alternate between simple cognitive tasks, performance on stimuli which are assigned the same response in both tasks is typically faster and more accurate than on stimuli which require different responses for both tasks, thus indicating stimulus processing according to the stimulus–response (S–R) rules of the currently irrelevant task. It is currently under debate whether such response congruency effects are mediated by the activation of an abstract representation of the irrelevant task in working memory or by “direct” associations between specific stimuli and responses. We contrasted these views by manipulating concurrent memory load (Experiment 1) and the frequency of specific S–R associations (Experiment 2). While between-task response congruency effects were not affected by the amount of concurrent memory load, they were much stronger for stimuli that were processed frequently in the context of a competitor task. These findings are consistent with the idea that a large portion of the congruency effects stems from direct S–R associations and they do not support a sole mediation by task-set activation in working memory.
Voetnoten
1
Because prime tasks were apparently unaffected by the memory load manipulation, we conducted a separate analysis on probe tasks only. In this analysis, the main effect of memory load was highly significant, F(1, 19)=11.21, p<0.01, MSE=3,612.7. Again, however, memory load did not interact with congruency, F(1, 19)<1.
 
2
It is interesting to note that with regard to the parity task the target and its direct numerical neighbors are always of a different parity and thus associated with different responses. In the magnitude task, however, the target and its numerical neighbors are most likely to share the same response category. This might actually be one reason for the typical advantage of the magnitude task over the parity task.
 
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Metagegevens
Titel
Task switching: on the origin of response congruency effects
Auteurs
Andrea Kiesel
Mike Wendt
Alexandra Peters
Publicatiedatum
01-03-2007
Uitgeverij
Springer-Verlag
Gepubliceerd in
Psychological Research / Uitgave 2/2007
Print ISSN: 0340-0727
Elektronisch ISSN: 1430-2772
DOI
https://doi.org/10.1007/s00426-005-0004-8

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