Control of stimulus set and response set in task switching

Successful goal-directed behavior requires not only selecting the correct response to an object in our environment but also requires selecting the correct object in our environment upon which to act. While most task-switching studies investigate the selection and maintenance of mental representations of response options (so-called response sets), they often do not investigate the selection and maintenance of mental representations of object selection (so-called stimulus sets). In the present study, participants were exposed to a taskswitching paradigm with multiple stimuli in which the relevant stimulus set (i.e., which object to respond to) and response set (i.e., how to respond to that object) independently either repeated or switched on each trial. Of interest was the nature of the task set representation required, and whether response set and stimulus set could be updated independently. Guided by predictions from a computational model of dual-task control (executive control of the theory of visual attention; Logan & Gordon, 2001), seven experiments were conducted that evaluated the independence of task-set components. All experiments confirmed executive control of the theory of visual attention's predictions of an underadditive interaction between response-set and stimulus-set sequence-diagnostic of independent and parallel reconfiguration of components. However, limitations to this independent updating were observed when participants were encouraged to selectively prioritize response-set or stimulus-set reconfiguration via component-specific preparation manipulations. The results are discussed in terms of various hypotheses on the structure of task-set representation. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2026 APA, all rights reserved).