Appealing to the cognitive miser: Using demand avoidance to modulate cognitive flexibility in cued and voluntary task switching.

Brosowsky, Nicholaus P.; Egner, Tobias

doi:10.1037/xhp0000942

Cited by 15 publications

(16 citation statements)

References 78 publications

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“…While we hope that this finding helps the further development of accounts emphasizing the modulation of task representations along the stability-flexibility continuum (e.g., Brosowsky & Egner, 2021 ; Dreisbach & Fröber, 2019 ), there is also one methodological implication. Participants typically show a strong avoidance of selecting task switches and this avoidance is sometimes even robust to environmental changes that make switching more attractive (e.g., Mittelstädt et al, 2019 ).…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 81%

“…In the probably most widely used version of the VTS paradigm, participants are instructed to select the tasks in each trial randomly (e.g., Arrington & Logan, 2004 ; Brosowsky & Egner, 2021 ; Demanet et al, 2010 ; Mayr & Bell, 2006 , Vermeylen et al, 2022 ). Although participants usually violate the instruction to select tasks randomly (i.e., they still select more often than chance task repetitions), they show reasonable switching behavior under these instructions (e.g., mean switch rates of >.30, cf.…”

Section: Voluntary Task Switchingmentioning

confidence: 99%

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The Role of Effector-Specific Task Representations in Voluntary Task Switching

Mittelstädt¹,

Leuthold²,

Mackenzie³

et al. 2023

Journal of Cognition

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There has been an increasing interest in uncovering the mechanisms underpinning how people decide which task to perform at a given time. Many studies suggest that task representations are crucial in guiding such voluntary task selection behavior, which is primarily reflected in a bias to select task repetitions over task switches. However, it is not yet clear whether the task-specific motor effectors are also a crucial component of task representations when deciding to switch tasks. Across three experiments using different voluntary task switching (VTS) procedures, we show that a greater overlap in task representations with a task-to-finger mapping than task-to-hand mapping increases participants’ switching behavior (Exp. 1 and Exp. 2), but not when they were instructed to randomly select tasks (Exp. 3). Thus, task-specific stimulus-response associations can change the way people mentally represent tasks and influence switching behavior, suggesting that motor effectors should be considered as a component of task representations in biasing cognitive flexibility.

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Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 81%

Section: Voluntary Task Switchingmentioning

confidence: 99%

The Role of Effector-Specific Task Representations in Voluntary Task Switching

Mittelstädt¹,

Leuthold²,

Mackenzie³

et al. 2023

Journal of Cognition

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“…Interestingly, there were important individual differences in how participants dealt with the difficulty and variability of the task, thus probably reflecting a "fingerprint" of well-differentiated traits (Franklin & Wolpert, 2011;Trevino et al, 2016Trevino et al, , 2023Trevino, Beltran-Navarro, et al, 2021;Trevino, Castiello, et al, 2021;Tsutsui et al, 2019). Given the complexity of our task, it's plausible that it engages various executive functions (EF) linked to intricate cognitive processes and adaptable motor control (Brosowsky & Egner, 2021). Interestingly, the demand for EF appears to be contingent on task difficulty: more complex (less automated) tasks require these functions to a greater degree than easier (more automated) tasks (Diamond, 2013;Lezak et al, 2004).…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Directional uncertainty in chase and escape dynamics.

Treviño,

Medina-Coss y León,

Támez

et al. 2024

Journal of Experimental Psychology: General

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Intercepting and avoiding collisions with moving targets are crucial skills for survival. However, little is known about how these behaviors are implemented when the trajectory of the moving target introduces variability and ambiguity into the perceptual-motor system. We developed a simple visuomotor task in which participants used a joystick to interact with a computer-controlled dot that moved along two-dimensional trajectories. This virtual system allowed us to define the role of the moving object (predator or prey) and adjust its speed and directional uncertainty (i.e., magnitude and frequency of random directional changes) during chase and escape trials. These factors had a significant impact on participants' performance in both chasing and escaping trials. We developed a simple geometrical model of potential chaser/escaper interactions to distinguish pursuit from interception chasing trajectories. We found that participants initially pursued the target but switched to a late interception strategy. The amount of late interception strategy followed an inverted U-shaped curve with the highest values at intermediate speeds. We tested the applicability of our task and methods in children who showed a robust developmental improvement in task performance and late interception strategy. Our task constitutes a flexible system in a virtual space for studying chasing and escaping behavior in adults and children. Our analytical methods allow detecting subtle changes in interception strategies, a valuable tool for studying the maturation of predictive and prospective systems, with a high potential to contribute to cognitive and developmental research. Public Significance StatementWe developed a computer-based visuomotor task to investigate how people chase and escape from moving targets under different conditions. Lower target speeds improved chasing and escaping abilities, while higher directional uncertainty compromised chasing but improved escaping. This research enhances our understanding of how humans adapt their behavior to intercept or avoid moving objects. Our approach has cognitive and developmental research applications, as children showed developmental improvements in task performance and strategy utilization. For example, clinicians could use a similar methodology to assess visuomotor performance and identify individual impairments. It has the potential to differentiate between neurotypical and neurodivergent adults and identify developmental disabilities in children, aiding in diagnostic tools and interventions for visuomotor difficulties. By capturing these behaviors' complexity and dependence on speed and uncertainty, our research contributes to our understanding of visuomotor coordination in children and adults.

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“…A further complication regarding the adaptive OEPs is that they can be applied using either of two different approaches that could be called “condition-specific” versus “pooled” 6 . With the condition-specific approach, the OEP is applied separately to the RTs of each participant in each condition (e.g., Brosowsky & Egner, 2021; Cochrane & Pratt, 2022; Janczyk & Ulrich, 2019; Plater et al, 2020; Van Selst & Jolicœur, 1994), so that outliers are identified as RTs that are discrepant from a participant’s other RTs in that same condition. For example, the Z -score for each RT in a given condition would be computed using the mean and standard deviation of the participant’s RTs only within that condition.…”

Section: Outlier Exclusion Proceduresmentioning

confidence: 99%

Outlier exclusion procedures for reaction time analysis: The cures are generally worse than the disease.

Miller¹

2023

Journal of Experimental Psychology: General

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A methodological problem in most reaction time (RT) tasks is that some measured RTs may be outliers, being either too fast or too slow to reflect the task-related processing of interest. Numerous ad hoc procedures have been used to identify these outliers for exclusion from further analyses, but the accuracies of these methods have not been systematically compared. The present study compared the performance of 58 different outlier exclusion procedures (OEPs) using four huge datasets of real RTs. The results suggest that these OEPs are likely to do more harm than good, because they incorrectly identify outliers, increase noise, introduce bias, and generally reduce statistical power. The results suggest that RT researchers should not automatically apply any of these OEPs to clean their RT data prior to the main analyses.

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Appealing to the cognitive miser: Using demand avoidance to modulate cognitive flexibility in cued and voluntary task switching.

Cited by 15 publications

References 78 publications

The Role of Effector-Specific Task Representations in Voluntary Task Switching

The Role of Effector-Specific Task Representations in Voluntary Task Switching

Directional uncertainty in chase and escape dynamics.

Outlier exclusion procedures for reaction time analysis: The cures are generally worse than the disease.

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