759Temporal tuning in the acquisition of cognitive skill

Carlson, Richard A.; Stevenson, Lisa M.

doi:10.3758/bf03196332

Cited by 4 publications

(4 citation statements)

References 24 publications

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“…From a functional perspective, this switch cost-SOA match would suggest that participants aim to minimise the response time in each trial. Thus, this strategy would be in line with findings observed in other non-VTS paradigms in which task selection is inherently biased to minimise temporal environmental or internal costs to achieve a task goal (here: to respond to one of the two tasks; Anderson, 1990; Carlson & Stevenson, 2002.…”

Section: The Self-organised Task-switching Paradigmsupporting

confidence: 68%

Balancing cognitive and environmental constraints when deciding to switch tasks: Exploring self-reported task-selection strategies in self-organised multitasking

Mittelstädt

Schaffernak

Miller

et al. 2020

Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology

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We investigated how people balance cognitive constraints (switch costs) against environmental constraints (stimulus availabilities) to optimize their voluntary task switching performance and explored individual differences in their switching behaviour. Specifically, in a self-organized task-switching environment, the stimulus needed for a task repetition was delayed by a stimulus-onset asynchrony (SOA) that increased with each consecutive repetition until a task switch reset the SOA. As predicted, participants switched tasks when the SOA in task switches approximately matched their individual switch costs and thus they optimized local task performance. Interestingly, self-reports (confirmed by behavioural switching patterns) revealed two individual strategies: Some participants (N = 34) indicated to guide their task selection behaviour based on preplanned task sequences over several trials, whereas others (N = 42) indicated to primarily decide on a trial-by-trial basis whether to switch or to repeat tasks. Exploration of switching behaviour based on the two strategy groups revealed additional insights into how people achieved adaptive task selection behaviour in this task environment. Overall, the present findings suggest that individuals select tasks with the aim of improving task performance when dealing with multiple task requirements, but they differ in their preferred individual task selection strategies.

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Section: The Self-organised Task-switching Paradigmsupporting

confidence: 68%

Balancing cognitive and environmental constraints when deciding to switch tasks: Exploring self-reported task-selection strategies in self-organised multitasking

Mittelstädt

Schaffernak

Miller

et al. 2020

Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology

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“…Thus, this suggests that participants tended to switch tasks when the availability benefits matched switch costs-a strategy that helped them to complete the overall block of trials more rapidly. 6 In retrospect, there is considerable evidence for the idea that the adaptation of behavior to the environment might be driven by cost-benefit considerations in which our cognitive system trades off its own limitations in an optimal manner against environmental constraints (Anderson, 1990;Carlson & Stevenson, 2002;Chater & Oaksford, 1999;Howes, Lewis, & Vera, 2009;Gray, Sims, Fu, & Schoelles, 2006). For example, participants are able to adopt optimal information acquisition strategies in arithmetic tasks when they adapt their involved cognitive processes to small temporal delays in information availability (Carlson & Stevenson, 2002;Stevenson & Carlson, 2003).…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…6 In retrospect, there is considerable evidence for the idea that the adaptation of behavior to the environment might be driven by cost-benefit considerations in which our cognitive system trades off its own limitations in an optimal manner against environmental constraints (Anderson, 1990;Carlson & Stevenson, 2002;Chater & Oaksford, 1999;Howes, Lewis, & Vera, 2009;Gray, Sims, Fu, & Schoelles, 2006). For example, participants are able to adopt optimal information acquisition strategies in arithmetic tasks when they adapt their involved cognitive processes to small temporal delays in information availability (Carlson & Stevenson, 2002;Stevenson & Carlson, 2003). Furthermore, a study that investigated the neural correlates of task selection in a dynamically changing task environment somewhat similar to the one used in the present experiments has provided hints of a neural connection between task selection and task performance (Wisniewski et al, 2015).…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Trading off switch costs and stimulus availability benefits: An investigation of voluntary task-switching behavior in a predictable dynamic multitasking environment

2018

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In the present study, we introduce a novel, self-organized task-switching paradigm that can be used to study more directly the determinants of switching. Instead of instructing participants to randomly switch between tasks, as in the classic voluntary task-switching paradigm (Arrington & Logan, 2004), we instructed participants to optimize their task performance in a voluntary task-switching environment in which the stimulus associated with the previously selected task appeared in each trial after a delay. Importantly, the stimulus onset asynchrony (SOA) increased further with each additional repetition of this task, whereas the stimulus needed for a task switch was always immediately available. We conducted two experiments with different SOA increments (i.e., Exp. 1a = 50 ms, Exp. 1b = 33 ms) to see whether this procedure would induce switching behavior, and we explored how people trade off switch costs against the increasing availability of the stimulus needed for a task repetition. We observed that participants adapted their behavior to the different task environments (i.e., SOA increments) and that participants switched tasks when the SOA in task switches approximately matched the switch costs. Moreover, correlational analyses indicated relations between individual switch costs and individual switch rates across participants. Together, these results demonstrate that participants were sensitive to the increased availability of switch stimuli in deciding whether to switch or to repeat, which in turn demonstrates flexible adaptive task selection behavior. We suggest that performance limitations in task switching interact with the task environment to influence switching behavior.

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“…The idea is that individuals speed up by learning to attend to the minimal information necessary to perform a task. The success of such minimal representations in controlling fluent activity by temporal synchrony will depend, of course, on regularities both in the time course of mental processes (Carlson & Stevenson, 2002; Sohn & Carlson, 2003) and in the task environment.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Intentional Control of Event Counting.

Carlson¹,

Cassenti²

2004

Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cogni

Self Cite

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Event counting depends on simple, well-learned knowledge but is effortful and error-prone. In 6 experiments, the authors examined event-counting performance, testing a model that suggests that counting is controlled by minimal goal representations coordinated with perceptual events by temporal synchrony. In Experiment 1, they examined self-paced counting with or without delays that disrupted participants' preferred pacing. In subsequent experiments, participants counted computer-paced events occurring at rhythmic or varied intervals, reporting or verifying totals. Several results support the model: Participants counted rhythmic events more accurately, made undetected undercount errors when counting rhythmic events, and made false alarms to undercount or overcount probes presented at different times. These results suggest that intentions that guide fluent counting specify parameters deictically rather than semantically and that error monitoring is implicit.

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759Temporal tuning in the acquisition of cognitive skill

Cited by 4 publications

References 24 publications

Balancing cognitive and environmental constraints when deciding to switch tasks: Exploring self-reported task-selection strategies in self-organised multitasking

Balancing cognitive and environmental constraints when deciding to switch tasks: Exploring self-reported task-selection strategies in self-organised multitasking

Trading off switch costs and stimulus availability benefits: An investigation of voluntary task-switching behavior in a predictable dynamic multitasking environment

Intentional Control of Event Counting.

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