Is it harder to switch among a larger set of tasks?

Abstract

When stimuli afford multiple tasks, switching among them involves promoting one of several task-sets in play into a most-active state. This process, often conceptualised as retrieving task parameters and stimulus-response (S-R) rules into procedural working memory, is a likely source of the reaction time cost of a task-switch, especially when no time is available for task preparation before the stimulus. We report two task-cuing experiments that asked whether the time consumed by task-set retrieval increases with the number of task-sets in play, whilst unconfounding the number of tasks with their frequency and recency of use. Participants were required to switch among 3 or 5 orthogonal classifications of perceptual attributes of an object (Experiment 1) or of phonological/semantic attributes of a word (Experiment 2), with a 100 or 1300 ms cue-stimulus interval. For two tasks for which recency and frequency were matched in the 3- and 5-task conditions, there was no effect of number of tasks on the switch cost. For the other tasks, there was a greater switch cost in the 5-task condition with little time for preparation, attributable to effects of frequency/recency. Thus retrieval time for active task-sets is not influenced by the number of alternatives per se (unlike several other kinds of memory retrieval) but is influenced by recency or frequency of use.