Spatial attention in task-switching Author note:The research presented in this paper was carried out by Cai Longman for his PhD under the supervision of Aureliu Lavric and Stephen Monsell. We are grateful to CristianMunteanu for the help in programming some of the more involved analyses.Longman, Lavric & Monsell 3 Spatial attention in task-switching AbstractAmong the potential, but neglected, sources of task-switch costs is the need to reallocate

Word count (text + references): 4,991 words Abstract: 215 words

The performance overhead associated with changing tasks (the "switch cost") usually diminishes when the task is specified in advance but is rarely eliminated by preparation. A popular account of the "residual" (asymptotic) switch cost is that it reflects "task-set inertia": carry-over of task-set parameters from the preceding trial(s). New evidence for a component of "task-set inertia" comes from eye-tracking, where the location associated with the previously (but no longer) relevant task is fixated preferentially over other irrelevant locations, even when preparation intervals are generous. Might such limits in overcoming task-set inertia in general, and "attentional inertia" in particular, result from suboptimal scheduling of preparation when the time available is outside one's control? In the present study, the stimulus comprised 3 digits located at the points of an invisible triangle, preceded by a central verbal cue specifying which of 3 classification tasks to perform, each consistently applied to just 1 digit location. The digits were presented only when fixation moved away from the cue, thus giving the participant control over preparation time. In contrast to our previous research with experimenter-determined preparation intervals, we found no sign of attentional inertia for the long preparation intervals. Self-paced preparation reduced but did not eliminate the performance switch cost-leaving a clear residual component in both reaction time and error rates. That the scheduling of preparation accounts for some, but not all, components of the residual switch cost, challenges existing accounts of the switch cost, even those which distinguish between preparatory and poststimulus reconfiguration processes. (PsycINFO Database Record

Coupling of task-set parameters -2 - AbstractIs spatial attention reconfigured independently of, or in tandem with, other task-set

Although instructions often emphasize categories (e.g., odd number→left hand response) rather than specific stimuli (e.g., 3→left hand response), learning is often interpreted in terms of stimulus-response (S-R) bindings or, less frequently, stimulus-classification (S-C) bindings with little attention being paid to the importance of category-response (C-R) bindings. In a training-transfer paradigm designed to investigate the early stages of category learning, participants were required to classify stimuli according to the category templates presented prior to each block (Experiments 1-4). In some transfer blocks the stimuli, categories and/or responses could be novel or repeated from the preceding training phase. Learning was assessed by comparing the transfer-training performance difference across conditions. Participants were able to rapidly transfer C-R associations to novel stimuli but evidence of S-C transfer was much weaker and S-R transfer was largely limited to conditions where the stimulus was classified under the same category. Thus, even though there was some evidence that learned S-R and S-C associations contributed to performance, learned C-R associations seemed to play a much more important role. In a final experiment (Experiment 5) the stimuli themselves were presented prior to each block, and the instructions did not mention the category structure. In this experiment, the evidence for S-R learning outweighed the evidence for C-R learning, indicating the importance of instructions in learning. The implications for these findings to the learning, cognitive control, and automaticity literatures are discussed.

Instructions are so effective that they can sometimes affect performance beyond the instructed context. Such ‘automatic’ effects of instructions (AEI) have received much interest recently. It has been argued that AEI are restricted to relatively simple and specific S-R tasks or action plans. The present study put this idea further to the test. In a series of experiments based on the NEXT paradigm ( Meiran, Pereg, Kessler, Cole, & Braver, 2015a ) we investigated the specificity of AEI. In Experiment 1, we presented category-response instructions instead of S-R instructions. Nevertheless, we observed AEI for novel stimuli from the instructed category (Experiment 1a), and abstractness of the category did not modulate the size of the NEXT effect (Experiment 1b). However, Experiment 2 revealed specificity at the response level: AEI were much smaller in conditions where the instructed GO response is semantically related to, but procedurally different from the required NEXT response, compared to a condition where the NEXT and GO responses were the same. Combined, these findings indicate that AEI can occur when S(C)-R instructions are abstract at the stimulus level, arguing against previous proposals. However, AEI does seem to require specificity at the response level. We discuss implications for recent theories of instruction-based learning and AEI.

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