Behavioural and electrophysiological measures of task switching during single and mixed-task conditions
Section snippets
Participants
Twenty young adults (6 men and 14 women; mean age = 24.5 years, S.D. = 3.4) participated in this study. Eighteen reported being right handed and two reported being left handed. All participants were recruited from either the Concordia University student population or through word of mouth and all reported being in good health. Informed consent was obtained from all participants and each was remunerated $20 for his/her participation.
Materials and apparatus
The target stimuli consisted of 16 concrete nouns (beetle, nail,
Behavioural data reduction
Prior to any cost analyses, RTs were trimmed for each of the five blocks such that RTs greater than or smaller than 2.5 standard deviations of the block mean or less than 200 ms were eliminated. This represented no more than a 7.4% loss of trials in any given block. RT data were analysed only for correct trials that followed at least two correct responses. In order to pool data, two analyses of variance (ANOVAs) were conducted to determine whether RT and accuracy scores for repeat and switch
Behavioural data
As expected, RT data revealed significant mixing and local switch costs, indicating that homogeneous trials were responded to more quickly than repeat trials, which in turn were responded to more quickly than switch trials. Accuracy was uniformly high and did not differ between trial types. Our behavioural results are largely consistent with past findings. That is, performance is poorer when having to switch between different tasks (Karayanidis et al., 2003, Meiran et al., 2000, Rogers and
Acknowledgements
A portion of these data was reported previously at the Eight International Conference on Cognitive Neuroscience (ICON8), Porquerolles Island, France, September 9–15, 2002. This study was supported by a grant awarded to N.A. Phillips from Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada (NSERC). We would like to thank S. Gagnon, T.S. Choy, and L. Ingenito for their assistance in subject testing, data processing and graphical processing. We are grateful to our study participants for
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