Dissociating restart cost and mixing cost in task switching |
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Authors: | Edita Poljac Iring Koch Harold Bekkering |
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Institution: | (1) Radboud University Nijmegen, Nijmegen, The Netherlands;(2) RWTH Aachen University, Aachen, Germany;(3) Nijmegen Institute for Cognition and Information, P.O. Box 9104, 6500 HE Nijmegen, The Netherlands |
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Abstract: | Three experiments investigated the cognitive mechanisms underlying the restart cost and mixing cost in task switching. To
this aim, the predictability of task order was varied (unpredictable in Experiment 1 and predictable in Experiments 2 and
3) across experiments, which employed a multiple-trial paradigm. Verbal cues for color and shape matching tasks were presented
before a run of four trials. Focusing on task-repetition runs only, we measured restart cost as the difference in performance
between trials 1 and 2 and mixing cost as the difference in performance on the non-cued trials under mixed-tasks conditions
(Experiments 1 and 2) and single-task conditions (Experiment 3). The restart cost was observed under mixed-tasks conditions
with both unpredictable and predictable task orders but not under the single-task condition. In contrast, the mixing cost
was observed under the mixed-tasks condition with unpredictable task order only (Experiment 1). This finding implies that
the optimal task execution on repetition trials depends on how predictable the identity of the approaching task is. Therefore,
we suggest that mixing cost arises from limited preparation on repetition trials when task order is unpredictable, while restart
cost arises from processes involved in cue-based task activation that is needed to resolve task interference. Together, these
data suggest that restart cost and mixing cost are based on dissociable mechanisms.
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