ArticleThe Journal of neuroscience : the official journal of the Society for Neuroscience2023
Lingering Neural Representations of Past Task Features Adversely Affect Future Behavior.
Article in The Journal of neuroscience : the official journal of the Society for Neuroscience, 2023. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 20 papers.
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Who cites it
20 citing papers in PubMed.
- Adaptive behavior is guided by integrated representations of controlled and non-controlled information.eLife · 2026Article
- Hierarchical Reconfiguration of Neurocognitive Task Set Representations Mediates Cognitive Flexibility.The Journal of neuroscience : the official journal of the Society for Neuroscience · 2026Article
- Cognitive flexibility versus stability via activation-based and weight-based adaptations.Communications psychology · 2026Article
- Neural traces of composite tasks in complex task representation in the human brain reflects learning performance.PLoS biology · 2026Article
- Frontoparietal Hubs Leverage Probabilistic Representations and Integrated Uncertainty to Guide Cognitive Flexibility.The Journal of neuroscience : the official journal of the Society for Neuroscience · 2025Article
- Adaptive behavior is guided by integrated representations of controlled and non-controlled information.bioRxiv : the preprint server for biology · 2025Article
- Frontoparietal Hubs Leverage Probabilistic Representations and Integrated Uncertainty to Guide Cognitive Flexibility.bioRxiv : the preprint server for biology · 2025Article
- Practice reshapes the geometry and dynamics of task-tailored representations.Cerebral cortex (New York, N.Y. : 1991) · 2025Article
- Task-Switch Related Reductions in Neural Distinctiveness in Children and Adults: Commonalities and Differences.The Journal of neuroscience : the official journal of the Society for Neuroscience · 2025Article
- Task structure tailors the geometry of neural representations in human lateral prefrontal cortex.bioRxiv : the preprint server for biology · 2025Article
- Cognitive Control.Annual review of psychology · 2025Review
- Semantic Anchors Facilitate Task Encoding in Continual Learning.Open mind : discoveries in cognitive science · 2025Article
- A transient high-dimensional geometry affords stable conjunctive subspaces for efficient action selection.Nature communications · 2024Article
- Practice Reshapes the Geometry and Dynamics of Task-tailored Representations.bioRxiv : the preprint server for biology · 2024Article
- A Transient High-dimensional Geometry Affords Stable Conjunctive Subspaces for Efficient Action Selection.bioRxiv : the preprint server for biology · 2024Article
- Binding of response-independent task rules.Psychonomic bulletin & review · 2024Article
- Task switch costs scale with dissimilarity between task rules.Journal of experimental psychology. General · 2024Article
- Neural mechanisms of domain-general inhibitory control.Trends in cognitive sciences · 2023Review
- Subspace partitioning in the human prefrontal cortex resolves cognitive interference.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2023Article
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3 authors.
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Abstract
During goal-directed behavior, humans purportedly form and retrieve so-called event files, conjunctive representations that link context-specific information about stimuli, their associated actions, and the expected action outcomes. The automatic formation, and later retrieval, of such conjunctive representations can substantially facilitate efficient action selection. However, recent behavioral work suggests that these event files may also adversely affect future behavior, especially when action requirements have changed between successive instances of the same task context (e.g., during task switching). Here, we directly tested this hypothesis with a recently developed method for measuring the strength of the neural representations of context-specific stimulus-action conjunctions (i.e., event files). Thirty-five male and female adult humans performed a task switching paradigm while undergoing EEG recordings. Replicating previous behavioral work, we found that changes in action requirements between two spaced repetitions of the same task incurred a significant reaction time cost. By combining multivariate pattern analysis and representational similarity analysis of the EEG recordings with linear mixed-effects modeling of trial-to-trial behavior, we then found that the magnitude of this behavioral cost was directly proportional to the strength of the conjunctive representation formed during the most recent previous exposure to the same task, that is, the most recent event file. This confirms that the formation of conjunctive representations of specific task contexts, stimuli, and actions in the brain can indeed adversely affect future behavior. Moreover, these findings demonstrate the potential of neural decoding of complex task set representations toward the prediction of behavior beyond the current trial.
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