What it costs to implement a plan: plan-level and task-level contributions to switch costs

Four experiments were conducted to identify the costs of implementing a plan in the task span procedure, which requires subjects to retrieve the task to perform on the current target from a list of planned tasks in memory. Experiment 1 compared switch costs in the task span procedure with switch costs in the explicit task-cuing procedure, which presented cues indicating the task to perform on each target. Switch costs were greater in the task span procedure. Experiments 2-4 were designed to identify the sources of this difference. Experiment 2 showed that the requirement of establishing a correspondence between the list of task names and the list of targets contributed to switch costs. Experiment 3 showed that retaining lists of similar task names produced greater switch costs than did retaining lists of dissimilar task names. Experiment 4 showed that memory load had no effect on switch costs. The results are discussed in terms of the interaction between plan-level and task-level processing in the implementation of plans.