Hierarchical switching with two types of judgment and two stimulus dimensions

A number of recent studies have shown that shifting among four tasks that result from a factorial combination of two types of judgment with two judgment-to-response mappings results in a characteristics pattern of shift costs that indicates a hierarchical representation of the two task features judgment and mapping (e.g., Kleinsorge & Heuer, 1999). In the present study, two types of judgment were combined with two stimulus dimensions. With this task combination, the same basic shift-cost pattern was observed. This suggests that a combination of two types of judgment with two stimulus dimensions also results in a hierarchically structured task representation, indicating that such a task representation is readily adopted by participants when the combination of task features is suitable for a hierarchical organization.