Switching between simple cognitive tasks: the interaction of top-down and bottom-up factors

Area of Science:

• Cognitive Psychology
• Human Factors
• Neuroscience

Background:

• Task readiness is influenced by both internal goals (top-down factors) and external stimuli (bottom-up factors).
• Understanding the interplay between these factors is crucial for optimizing performance in various cognitive tasks.
• Previous research often treated task repetition as a binary variable, potentially obscuring nuanced interactions.

Purpose of the Study:

• To investigate the interaction between top-down task expectancy and bottom-up task recency on task readiness.
• To determine if these factors interact additively or underadditively.
• To elucidate the specific stages of mental processing affected by expectancy and recency.

Main Methods:

• A task-switching paradigm was employed, factorially manipulating task expectancy and task repetition.
• Task recency was scaled continuously, moving beyond a traditional binary approach.
• Response times were measured across four experiments to assess the effects of the manipulated variables.

Main Results:

• When task recency was treated as a continuous variable, expectancy and recency showed additive effects.
• The traditional binary task-repetition variable masked this additivity, leading to apparent underadditive interactions.
• Expectancy and recency were found to influence different stages of cognitive processing.

Conclusions:

• Task expectancy and task recency independently affect distinct phases of mental operations.
• Task expectancy influences the configuration of central operations.
• Task recency impacts the execution of central operations, supporting the configuration-execution model.