Citation

Kleinsorge T, Gajewski PD. Acta Psychol. 2007; 125(3): 334-345.

Affiliation

Institut für Arbeitsphysiologie an der Universität Dortmund, Ardeystrasse 67, D-44139 Dortmund, Germany. kliensorge@ifado.de

Copyright

(Copyright © 2007, Elsevier Publishing)

DOI

10.1016/j.actpsy.2006.09.002

PMID

17055442

Abstract

We combined task switching with a change paradigm to trace the transformation of the information conveyed by task cues into a readiness to perform the cued task. The tasks were composed of two components that allowed us to determine switch costs as a function of the number of changed task components. With a short stimulus-onset asynchrony (SOA) of 200ms, switch costs grew monotonically as a function of the number of changed components. With a SOA of 400ms, the switch-cost profile exhibited a nonmonotonic characteristic that was previously observed only with switches from an already performed task. Our observations suggest that task preparation can be considered as a process by which an unstructured representation of task components is gradually transformed into an integrated task representation that comprises asymmetrical associations between the task components.

Language: en