Jove
Visualize
Contact Us
JoVE
x logofacebook logolinkedin logoyoutube logo
ABOUT JoVE
OverviewLeadershipBlogJoVE Help Center
AUTHORS
Publishing ProcessEditorial BoardScope & PoliciesPeer ReviewFAQSubmit
LIBRARIANS
TestimonialsSubscriptionsAccessResourcesLibrary Advisory BoardFAQ
RESEARCH
JoVE JournalMethods CollectionsJoVE Encyclopedia of ExperimentsArchive
EDUCATION
JoVE CoreJoVE BusinessJoVE Science EducationJoVE Lab ManualFaculty Resource CenterFaculty Site
Terms & Conditions of Use
Privacy Policy
Policies

Related Experiment Videos

Implicit task sets in task switching?

Gesine Dreisbach1, Thomas Goschke, Hilde Haider

  • 1Institute of Psychology I, Dresden University of Technology, Dresden, Germany. dreisbach@psychomail.tu-dresden.de

Journal of Experimental Psychology. Learning, Memory, and Cognition
|November 8, 2006
PubMed
Summary
This summary is machine-generated.

Related Concept Videos

You might also read

Related Articles

Articles linked to this work by shared authors, journal, and citation graph.

Sort by
Same author

The asymmetric list shift effect - flexible adaptation to new context demands?

Attention, perception & psychophysics·2026
Same author

Investigating the Effects of Acute Stress on Neural Mechanisms of Self-controlled Decision-making.

Journal of cognitive neuroscience·2026
Same author

The association between the error-related negativity and self-control is moderated by impulsivity and compulsivity.

Communications psychology·2026
Same author

Task switching promotes switch readiness: Evidence from forced and voluntary task switching.

Cognition·2026
Same author

Exploring the link between anticipatory outcome encoding in the brain and goal-directed behavior during outcome devaluation.

Imaging neuroscience (Cambridge, Mass.)·2025
Same author

The motivational consequences of boredom.

Cognition & emotion·2025
Same journal

Testing the predictions of a distinctiveness model of memory: The production effect in backward recall.

Journal of experimental psychology. Learning, memory, and cognition·2026
Same journal

On the impact of adjacency on transposed-word effects under serial presentation.

Journal of experimental psychology. Learning, memory, and cognition·2026
Same journal

It's time to opt out: Metacognitive analysis of time regulation under uncertainty.

Journal of experimental psychology. Learning, memory, and cognition·2026
Same journal

The role of statistical learning in attentional guidance during search through naturalistic scenes.

Journal of experimental psychology. Learning, memory, and cognition·2026
Same journal

Representing objects and features in long-term memory: A case for direct feature-feature binding.

Journal of experimental psychology. Learning, memory, and cognition·2026
Same journal

Crossmodal correspondences influence adaptation during rule-based category learning of objects.

Journal of experimental psychology. Learning, memory, and cognition·2026
See all related articles

Knowledge of task rules increases cognitive costs during task switching. Without rule knowledge, participants implicitly learned stimulus-response categories, avoiding switch costs but showing slower responses to incongruent stimuli.

Area of Science:

  • Cognitive Psychology
  • Neuroscience
  • Human-Computer Interaction

Background:

  • Understanding how task rules influence cognitive control is crucial for optimizing learning and performance.
  • Previous research has explored stimulus-based versus rule-based task processing, but the interplay of explicit rule knowledge and implicit learning remains debated.

Purpose of the Study:

  • To investigate the impact of explicit task-rule knowledge on task performance, specifically examining switch and transfer costs.
  • To explore whether participants can acquire implicit knowledge of task rules in the absence of explicit instruction.

Main Methods:

  • Two experiments were conducted comparing task performance with and without prior knowledge of underlying task sets.
  • Participants practiced stimulus-response mappings, followed by transfer blocks with novel stimuli.

Related Experiment Videos

  • Response times and accuracy were measured to assess switch and transfer costs, and reaction to congruent versus incongruent stimuli.

    • Main Results:

    • Explicit rule knowledge led to significant switch and transfer costs, indicating interference from learned rules.
    • In the absence of rule knowledge, participants exhibited no switch costs but showed slower response times for incongruent stimuli in transfer blocks.
    • Interactions between task type and response type were significant in both conditions, suggesting complex response selection processes.

    Conclusions:

    • Explicit knowledge of task rules imposes a cognitive burden, increasing costs associated with task switching and transfer.
    • Participants can implicitly acquire task-rule knowledge, enabling efficient performance on novel stimuli, even without conscious awareness of the rules.
    • The findings highlight the distinct mechanisms underlying explicit rule-based and implicit stimulus-based task control.