ArticleFrontiers in psychology2026
The Random Soldier Kinematogram: a novel tool for task-switching research in military context.
Article in Frontiers in psychology, 2026. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Not yet cited in PubMed.
What it found
Each row is one number read from the abstract, on the scale the paper reported it, with its interval. Left of the dashed line favours the treatment, right favours the comparator. Under each row is the sentence it came from. New to these charts? A ten-minute tutorial.
The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.
The trial behind it
Trials whose registry record cites this paper, or whose number appears in the abstract. A trial that started after this paper was published is citing it as background, not reporting it.
Neither the registry nor the abstract names a trial number. If this is a trial report, that itself is worth knowing.
Who cites it
0 citing papers in PubMed.
No citing paper in PubMed yet.
Corrections and comments
PubMed lists nothing against this paper. Absence here is not a guarantee, only a check that was made.
Authors and funding
4 authors.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
Adaptive behavior in high-stakes, multitasking environments requires flexible switching between tasks with changing circumstances. However, task switching has typically been studied using static, simple, and unnoisy stimuli that are unrepresentative of most real-world operational environments. Here, we developed the Random Soldier Kinematogram (RSK), an array of moving soldiers, to better reflect the processing demands of military operational environments with dynamic, complex, and noisy stimuli. Across three experiments, we introduced RSK motion (discriminating the coherent motion direction: leftward/rightward) and color (discriminating the majority uniform color: khaki/white) tasks, by examining their cognitive-control demands in single-task blocks (Experiments 1 and 2) and a task-switching context (Experiment 3). Experiment 1 ruled out the possibility that perceptual differences between uniform colors involved different discrimination performances. Experiment 2 orthogonally varied motion coherence and color coherence to gain insight into participants' sensitivity to target (task-relevant) and distractor (task-irrelevant) information. Results showed unequal task strength, with a motion task that is less control-demanding (dominant) and a color task that is more control-demanding (non-dominant), to overcome interference from motion. Experiment 3 investigated the efficiency of cognitive control processes involved in switching between RSK tasks (switch costs) and maintaining competing task-sets (mixing costs). Asymmetric switch cost was found, with larger cost when switching to the motion (dominant) task, since stronger cognitive effort was necessary to release it from its backward inhibition. We conclude that RSK expands possibilities for task-switching research in the military by better sampling soldiers' surrounding informational constraints with adjustable signal-to-noise ratios of task-relevant and task-irrelevant information.
Indexed as
Identifiers
What OpenQuestion holds
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.