Is Task Switching Nothing but Cue Priming? Evidence from ERPs

Overview

Journal Cogn Affect Behav Neurosci

Publisher Springer

Specialties Neurology
Social Sciences

Date 2008 Apr 15

PMID 18405048

Citations 45

Authors

Kerstin Jost

Ulrich Mayr

Frank Rosler

Affiliations

Soon will be listed here.

Abstract

Recent findings suggesting that switch costs in the task-cuing paradigm are largely attributable to a change in the task-indicating cue have been interpreted in terms of a priming model of task-switch costs (Logan & Bundesen, 2003). According to this explanation, participants do not actually switch task sets, but merely use a cue-stimulus compound to disambiguate competing response tendencies associated with bivalent stimuli. Here, we report an event-related potential (ERP) experiment that provides evidence against this notion. In a paradigm with a 2:1 mapping between cues and tasks, we show that cue-switch and task-switch effects are dissociable on a neurophysiological level, indicating that task switching is more than a switch in the task-indicating cue. Moreover, a systematic analysis of the ERPs during the cue-stimulus interval suggests that updating processes can run in advance, before the stimulus is presented.

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