What matters in the cued task-switching paradigm: tasks or cues?

Abstract

Schneider and Logan (2006) recently showed that cue-switch and task-switch costs are sensitive to the relative probability of cue switches versus task switches. From this they concluded that task-switch costs reflect priming of cue-cue transitions rather than actual task-switching operations. However, because this design confounded probability of specific cue transitions with probability of task switches, the results could also reflect task-switch-level adjustments. The present experiment (N = 80) pits the critical prediction of the cue-priming account, namely that costs for high-probability cue-cue transitions are smaller than for low-probability cue-cue transitions, against the main prediction of the switch-probability account, namely that switch probability, irrespective of specific cue-cue transitions, determines switch costs. Whereas the cue-priming prediction was rejected, a specific version of the probability account--that subjects are sensitive to the probability of a task switch, given a cue switch--was fully confirmed. Thus, tasks are in fact the critical representational units that determine task-switch cost.