Abstract
With insufficient time to fully prepare for a switch in task, a deterioration in performance on the first trial of a new task would be expected. The interest of researchers has been captured by the residual switch costs that, surprisingly, remain despite sufficient time to prepare.We used a very simple task to investigate the costs to reaction time and accuracy associated with changing between two different instructional sets every eight trials. Subjects responded to left and right visual targets by making either spatially compatible or incompatible eye movements (Experiment 1) or buttonpress responses (Experiment 2). The subjectswere cued as to whether tomake the compatible or the incompatible response by the color of a border appearing on the perimeter of the display. In cases in which the subject alternated betweenmaking pro- and antisaccades,the large costs to reaction time and accuracy at the short cue—target stimulus onset asynchrony were completely eliminated when sufficient time was provided to prepare for the switch. This complete elimination of residual switch costs was not obtained when the same alternationwas applied to manual responses. This pattern of results links residual costs to response selectionprocesses and suggests that they are not a necessarycomponent of the switch process. We propose that the elimination of “stubborn” residual switch costs is rooted in our use of ahyper-compatible task (making saccadestoward targets) that placesminimal demands on response selection.
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Some of these data were reported by the second author at the 40th Annual Meeting of the PsychonomicSociety in Los Angeles in 1999 and appeared on a poster at the joint meeting of the Canadian Society for Brain, Behaviour and CognitiveScience and the Experimental PsychologySociety in Cambridge, England in June of 2000. This research was supported bytheNatural Sciences and EngineeringResearch CouncilofCanada.
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Hunt, A.R., Klein, R.M. Eliminating the cost of task set reconfiguration. Memory & Cognition 30, 529–539 (2002). https://doi.org/10.3758/BF03194954
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.3758/BF03194954