ArticleMemory & cognition2018
Trading off switch costs and stimulus availability benefits: An investigation of voluntary task-switching behavior in a predictable dynamic multitasking environment.
Article in Memory & cognition, 2018. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 21 papers.
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Who cites it
21 citing papers in PubMed.
- Cognitive flexibility versus stability via activation-based and weight-based adaptations.Communications psychology · 2026Article
- Balancing Cognitive Flexibility and Stability: The Role of Reward, Autism, and Transdiagnostic Traits.Journal of cognition · 2026Article
- Repeating Task-Irrelevant Contexts Does Not Bias Task Choice and Performance in Voluntary Task Switching.Journal of cognition · 2026Article
- Social identity switching: An investigation of non-demographic identities with computational-linguistic and self-report measures.The British journal of social psychology · 2025Article
- Characterizing age-related change in learning the value of cognitive effort.Journal of experimental psychology. General · 2025Article
- The benefit of choice on task performance: Reduced difficulty effects in free-choice versus forced-choice tasks.Memory & cognition · 2025Article
- The influence of reward and loss outcomes after free- and forced-tasks on voluntary task choice.Psychological research · 2024Article
- Task performance errors and rewards affect voluntary task choices.Psychological research · 2024Article
- Reactive and proactive control processes in voluntary task choice.Memory & cognition · 2024Article
- Subjective estimates of total processing time in dual-tasking: (some) good news for bad introspection.Psychological research · 2023Article
- Individual differences in everyday multitasking behavior and its relation to cognition and personality.Psychological research · 2023Review
- Integrating cognition in the laboratory with cognition in the real world: the time cognition takes, task fidelity, and finding tasks when they are mixed together.Frontiers in psychology · 2023Review
- The Role of Effector-Specific Task Representations in Voluntary Task Switching.Journal of cognition · 2023Article
- Are some effector systems harder to switch to? In search of cost asymmetries when switching between manual, vocal, and oculomotor tasks.Memory & cognition · 2022Article
- Timing of internal processes: Investigating introspection about the costs of task switching and memory search.Attention, perception & psychophysics · 2022Article
- Individual Strategies of Response Organization in Multitasking Are Stable Even at Risk of High Between-Task Interference.Frontiers in psychology · 2022Article
- Evaluating students' engagement with an online learning environment during and after COVID-19 related school closures: A survival analysis approach.Trends in neuroscience and education · 2021Article
- Appealing to the cognitive miser: Using demand avoidance to modulate cognitive flexibility in cued and voluntary task switching.Journal of experimental psychology. Human perception and performance · 2021Article
- Does temporal predictability of tasks influence task choice?Psychological research · 2021Article
- Individual preferences for task coordination strategies in multitasking: exploring the link between preferred modes of processing and strategies of response organization.Psychological research · 2021Article
Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
3 authors.
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No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
In the present study, we introduce a novel, self-organized task-switching paradigm that can be used to study more directly the determinants of switching. Instead of instructing participants to randomly switch between tasks, as in the classic voluntary task-switching paradigm (Arrington & Logan, 2004), we instructed participants to optimize their task performance in a voluntary task-switching environment in which the stimulus associated with the previously selected task appeared in each trial after a delay. Importantly, the stimulus onset asynchrony (SOA) increased further with each additional repetition of this task, whereas the stimulus needed for a task switch was always immediately available. We conducted two experiments with different SOA increments (i.e., Exp. 1a = 50 ms, Exp. 1b = 33 ms) to see whether this procedure would induce switching behavior, and we explored how people trade off switch costs against the increasing availability of the stimulus needed for a task repetition. We observed that participants adapted their behavior to the different task environments (i.e., SOA increments) and that participants switched tasks when the SOA in task switches approximately matched the switch costs. Moreover, correlational analyses indicated relations between individual switch costs and individual switch rates across participants. Together, these results demonstrate that participants were sensitive to the increased availability of switch stimuli in deciding whether to switch or to repeat, which in turn demonstrates flexible adaptive task selection behavior. We suggest that performance limitations in task switching interact with the task environment to influence switching behavior.
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Registered trials
Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.