A Free Choice? Binding of a Task-Irrelevant Context in Voluntary Task Switching

Previous research provided evidence for feature binding and episodic retrieval processes in task switching, also involving task-irrelevant features (the context henceforth). This latter evidence consisted in performance benefits when all the features of the previous trial (the task, the response and the context) repeated in the current trial (i.e., a full repetition), compared to when some switched (i.e., a partial repetition). In the present study, we examine whether the task becomes bound with the context in each trial, and whether repeating the context retrieves the previous task by using a different approach. We employed a voluntary task-switching paradigm, wherein participants are free to pick the task to perform in each trial among two possible tasks. In order to ensure a sufficient number of task switches, we employed a procedure devised by Mittelstädt et al. (2018). Specifically, in each trial, we delay the onset of the task-repetition stimulus, with a delay that increases the more consecutive task repetitions are performed. Since the more active a task set is, the more likely it is selected, we predict that repeating the context will increase n-1 voluntary task repetitions. unknown other