Investigating the shift between externally and internally oriented cognition: a novel task-switching paradigm

Abstract

Despite our constant need to flexibly balance internal and external information, research on cognitive flexibility has focused solely on shifts between externally oriented tasks. In contrast, switches across internally oriented processes (and self-referential cognition specifically) and between internal and external domains have never been investigated. Here, we report a novel task-switching paradigm developed to explore the behavioural signatures associated with cognitive flexibility when self-referential processes, as well as more traditional external processes, are involved. Two hundred healthy volunteers completed an online task. In each trial, participants performed one of four possible tasks on written words, as instructed by a pre-stimulus cue. These included two externally and two internally oriented tasks: assessing whether the third letter was a consonant or the penultimate letter was a vowel versus assessing whether the adjective applied to their personality or if it described a bodily sensation they were currently experiencing. In total, 40% of trials involved switches to another task, and these were equally distributed across within-external, within-internal, internal-to-external and external-to-internal switches. We found higher response times for switches compared to repetitions both in the external and internal domains, thus demonstrating the presence of switch costs in self-referential tasks for the first time. We also found higher response times for between-domain switches compared to switches within each domain. We propose that these effects originate from the goal-directed engagement of different domain-specific cognitive systems that flexibly communicate and share domain-general control features.

Shifting attention between perception and working memory

“…We predicted we would observe additional costs for shifting between as opposed to within domains in line with the previous literature (Calzolari et al, 2022;Carlson et al, 1993;Dark, 1990;Gilbert et al, 2005;Hautekiet et al, 2023;Verschooren et al, 2020;Verschooren, Liefooghe, et al, 2019;Weber, Burt, & Noll, 1986). However, we made no directional prediction concerning whether shifts would be faster or incur greater costs when moving from one specific domain to the other (i.e., internal-to-external vs. external-to-internal).…”

“…Early behavioural studies used listreproduction tasks requiring verbal or manual reports of digits or letter series which were either perceptually available, stored in memory, or required integration across both domains (Carlson, Wenger, & Sullivan, 1993;Dark, 1990;Weber, Burt, & Noll, 1986). After a relative hiatus, the question of shifting attention between sensory and internally generated information has attracted renewed interest (Calzolari, Boneva, & Fernández-Espejo, 2022;Gilbert, Frith, & Burgess, 2005;Hautekiet, Verschooren, Langerock, & Vergauwe, 2023;Honey, Newman, & Schapiro, 2017;Poskanzer & Aly, 2023;Servais, Hurter, & Barbeau, 2023;Steel, Silson, Garcia, & Robertson, 2024;Treder et al, 2021;Verschooren, Liefooghe, Brass, & Pourtois, 2019;Verschooren, Pourtois, & Egner, 2020;Verschooren, Schindler, De Raedt, & Pourtois, 2019;Verschooren, Schindler, De Raedt, & Pourtois, 2021;Weilnhammer, Stuke, Standvoss, & Sterzer, 2023). For instance, researchers have replicated earlier work within the visual domain using tasks that require participants to shift between perception and memory on a trial-by-trial basis (Hautekiet et al, 2023;Verschooren et al, 2020;Verschooren, Liefooghe, et al, 2019).…”

“…Working memory is the core internal buffer for guiding adaptive behaviour (Funahashi, Bruce, & Goldman-Rakic, 1989;Fuster & Alexander, 1971;Myers et al, 2017;Nobre & Stokes, 2019; van Ede & Nobre, 2023). Yet, most previous studies have focused on attentional shifting between external and other internal domains, such as imagination (Gilbert et al, 2005) or selforiented cognition (Calzolari et al, 2022). Even when internal attention was operationalised as memory, it was often limited to the verbal modality (Carlson et al, 1993;Dark, 1990;Weber, Burt, & Noll, 1986) or closely linked to long-term memory representations (Hautekiet et al, 2023;Verschooren et al, 2020Verschooren et al, , 2021Verschooren, Liefooghe, et al, 2019;Verschooren, Schindler, et al, 2019).…”

“…However, we made no directional prediction concerning whether shifts would be faster or incur greater costs when moving from one specific domain to the other (i.e., internal-to-external vs. external-to-internal). Previous work has highlighted that shifting from the internal to the external domain may incur less costs than vice versa (Calzolari et al, 2022;Dark, 1990;Hautekiet et al, 2023;Verschooren et al, 2020). However, given the differences in our experimental designspecifically investigating attentional shifts towards a single responsewe chose to remain neutral to the possible outcomes.…”

Neural dynamics of shifting attention between perception and working-memory contents

“…3). We cautiously argue, therefore, that previously observed between-domain shift costs in performance 17–21,24,48 are unlikely explained exclusively by interference at a late response-level response stage, but rather emerge already during the attention shifting process itself.…”