Abstract
In two experiments, subjects were given arbitrary letter cues or meaningful word cues that specified the task to be performed on a subsequent target stimulus. Letter and word cues were presented in separate blocks. There were two cues of each type for each task. Three kinds of transitions separated tasks:cue repetitions, in which both the cue and the task repeated;task repetitions, in which the cue changed but the task repeated; andtask alternations, in which both the cue and the task changed. Responses were faster for cue than for task repetitions for both cue types. With word cues, task repetitions were not reliably faster than task alternations. With letter cues, task repetitions were reliably faster than task alternations in the first block but not in the second block. The results suggest that subjects responded to the compound of the cue and the target rather than switching task set between trials.
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This research was supported by National Science Foundation Grants BCS 0133202 and BCS 0218507 and by a grant from the Danish Research Council for the Humanities.
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Logan, G.D., Bundesen, C. Very clever homunculus: Compound stimulus strategies for the explicit task-cuing procedure. Psychonomic Bulletin & Review 11, 832–840 (2004). https://doi.org/10.3758/BF03196709
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.3758/BF03196709