Stimulus-response Complexity Influences Task-set Inhibition in Task Switching

Overview

Journal PeerJ

Specialties Biology
Environmental Health
General Medicine

Date 2021 Apr 14

PMID 33850644

Citations 1

Authors

Li Zhao

Saisai Hu

Yingying Xia

Jinyu Li

Jingjing Zhao

Ya Li

Yonghui Wang

Affiliations

Soon will be listed here.

Abstract

Previous studies have found that inhibiting a task set plays an important role in task switching. However, the impact of stimulus-response (S-R) complexity on this inhibition processing has not been explored. In this study, we applied the backward inhibition paradigm (switching between tasks A, B, and C, presented in sets of three) in order to investigate inhibition performance under different S-R complexities caused by corresponding S-R mappings. The results showed that the difficult condition resulted in a greater switch cost than the moderate and easy conditions. Furthermore, we found a significant 2 repetition cost under the easy S-R complexity that was reversed under the difficult S-R complexity. To verify stability of the reversed 2 repetition cost in the difficult condition, we recruited another independent sample to conduct an additional experiment with the difficult condition. These results replicated the reversed -2 repetition cost. These findings suggest that S-R complexity affects task-set inhibition in task switching because the effect of the task-set inhibition was insignificant when the S-R complexity increased; it was only significant under the easy condition. This result was caused by the different cognitive resource assignments.

Citing Articles

Exploring the comparative adequacy of a unimanual and a bimanual stimulus-response setup for use with three-alternative choice response time tasks.

Ottl A, Kim J, Behne D, Gygax P, Hyona J, Gabriel U PLoS One. 2023; 18(3):e0281377.

PMID: 36920982 PMC: 10016697. DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0281377.

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