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Between-task competition for intentions and actions.

Rebecca S Millington1, Edita Poljac, Nick Yeung

  • 1Nuffield Department of Clinical Neurosciences, University of Oxford, Oxford, UK. rebecca.millington@ndcn.ox.ac.uk

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Summary
This summary is machine-generated.

Task switching incurs performance costs due to between-task competition, influencing intentions and actions. This competition biases choices, particularly when shifting from difficult to easier tasks, impacting cognitive control.

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Area of Science:

  • Cognitive Psychology
  • Neuroscience
  • Human Factors

Background:

  • Task switching allows cognitive flexibility but introduces between-task competition.
  • This competition leads to distractibility by irrelevant stimuli and errors from prior tasks.
  • Performance costs and a bias against switching tasks are common consequences.

Purpose of the Study:

  • To investigate the locus of between-task competition effects in voluntary task switching.
  • To determine if competition influences task intentions independently of task-specific actions.
  • To examine the automaticity and pervasiveness of these competition effects.

Main Methods:

  • Two experiments involving voluntary task switching between easy location and difficult shape classification tasks.
  • Participants made two responses per trial: one for task choice, one for task execution.
  • Analysis of task choice biases and subsequent task performance.

Main Results:

  • Participants preferentially chose the more difficult shape task over the easier location task.
  • This choice bias indicates that between-task competition affects task intentions.
  • The bias was more pronounced in individuals with faster choice-selection speeds, suggesting automaticity.

Conclusions:

  • Between-task competition exerts a pervasive influence on cognitive control.
  • Competition affects both high-level task intentions and low-level task-specific actions.
  • These effects persist even with ample time for task preparation, highlighting their automatic nature.