Contingency and similarity in response selection

Area of Science:

• Cognitive Psychology
• Human Performance

Background:

• Understanding task representation is crucial for explaining performance in cognitive tasks.
• Choice reaction time tasks are standard paradigms for studying cognitive processes.

Purpose of the Study:

• To explore how tasks are represented to enable instructed performance.
• To propose a framework for task representation integrating representational operations.

Main Methods:

• Outlining a framework for task representation.
• Combining task set implementation with representational operations.
• Embedding the framework within the contingency-similarity debate.

Main Results:

• A framework combining task sets and representational operations is presented.
• The framework integrates feature compounds for event codes and code assemblies for task sets.
• Both contingency and similarity are identified as necessary principles for association formation.

Conclusions:

• Task representation requires both contingency and similarity.
• Similarity at the task set level presupposes contingency at the event code level.