Department of Psychology, Max Planck Institute for Human Cognitive and Brain Sciences, Munich, Germany. waszak@psy.mpg.de
Abstract:
People find it difficult to switch between two tasks, even if they have time to prepare—the so-called residual task shift
cost. We studied a switch of tasks from picture naming to word reading, using picture-word Stroop stimuli. Consistent with
previous findings, we demonstrate that a large part of the observed task shift cost was due to priming from prior stimulus-response
episodes, in which the current task stimulus was encountered in a competing task. We further show that this task-priming effect
generalizes to semantically related stimuli, which opens the possibility that most or all of these residual shift costs reflect
some sort of generalized proactive interference from previous stimulus-task episodes.