Voluntary task switching under load: Contribution of top-down and bottom-up factors in goal-directed behavior

Demanet, Jelle; Verbruggen, Frederick; Liefooghe, Baptist; Vandierendonck, André · 2010 · Crossref

DOI: 10.3758/pbr.17.3.387

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Summary

This study investigates the interplay between top-down (goal-directed) and bottom-up (stimulus-driven) control in voluntary task switching (VTS). While VTS allows participants to freely choose tasks, previous research indicates a bias toward repeating the previous task, suggesting that top-down inhibition is required to overcome this automatic tendency. The authors aimed to determine how cognitive load affects this balance and which specific bottom-up factors influence task selection. They hypothesized that impairing top-down control via working memory load would increase reliance on bottom-up processes, thereby strengthening the task-repetition bias and specific priming effects. The research comprised three experiments using a VTS paradigm where participants performed magnitude or parity tasks (Experiments 1 and 2) or animacy and size tasks (Experiment 3). To manipulate top-down control efficiency, participants in the "load" condition maintained six items in working memory during the VTS phase, whereas the "no-load" condition had no concurrent memory demand. Experiment 1 examined the effect of stimulus repetitions. Experiment 2 replaced stimulus repetitions with repetitions of task-irrelevant shapes to test if visual repetition alone drove the effect. Experiment 3 introduced strong stimulus-task associations through a training phase to test if retrieved associations influenced task choice. The results demonstrated that the task-repetition bias was significantly stronger under load than in the no-load condition across all experiments, confirming that top-down control normally counteracts the automatic tendency to repeat tasks. In Experiment 1, stimulus repetitions increased task repetition only under load, indicating that this specific bottom-up effect depends on the efficiency of top-down control. However, in Experiments 2 and 3, priming effects from irrelevant shape repetitions and learned stimulus-task associations occurred regardless of load. This dissociation suggests that while some bottom-up factors operate independently of cognitive demand, the influence of stimulus repetitions on task selection is contingent on top-down resources. The findings imply that voluntary task selection is not purely intentional but is heavily influenced by environmental cues. Crucially, the study suggests that the primary function of top-down control in VTS is not to actively select a task, but to inhibit automatically triggered responses and suppress the re-execution of previous task sets. When top-down control is degraded by load, participants fail to inhibit these automatic responses, leading to increased task repetition. Thus, "voluntary" behavior in this context is defined more by the suppression of unwilled, automatic actions than by the active initiation of willed ones.

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Topics

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• task switching
• executive function