The Role of Effector-Specific Task Representations in Voluntary Task Switching

Mittelstädt, Victor; Leuthold, Hartmut; Mackenzie, Ian Grant; Dykstra, Tobin; Hazeltine, Eliot · 2023 · Journal of Cognition

DOI: 10.5334/joc.255

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Summary

This study investigates whether motor effectors constitute a component of task representations that influence voluntary task selection. While previous research established that people exhibit a strong bias toward repeating tasks rather than switching them in voluntary task switching (VTS) paradigms, it remained unclear if the specific mapping of tasks to response effectors (e.g., hands vs. fingers) affects this behavior. The authors hypothesized that greater overlap in task representations, potentially induced by specific effector mappings, could alter switching rates by influencing the activation levels of competing task sets. The researchers conducted three experiments using different VTS procedures to manipulate effector-specific task mappings. In Experiments 1 and 2, participants performed tasks without instructions to switch randomly, utilizing adaptive stimulus onset asynchrony (SOA) and hybrid free-forced paradigms, respectively, to encourage natural switching behavior. Experiment 3 employed a standard VTS paradigm with explicit instructions to select tasks randomly. Across all experiments, the critical manipulation compared a "task-to-hand" mapping (each task assigned to a different hand) with a "task-to-finger" mapping (each task assigned to homologous fingers across hands, e.g., left and right index fingers). This design allowed the authors to test whether the anatomical and spatial distinctness of effectors influences how mentally distinct tasks are represented and, consequently, how frequently participants switch between them. The results demonstrated that effector-specific mappings significantly influenced voluntary switching behavior when participants were not instructed to switch randomly. In both Experiment 1 and Experiment 2, participants exhibited higher switch rates in the task-to-finger condition compared to the task-to-hand condition. Specifically, in Experiment 1, mean switch rates were 33% for the task-to-finger mapping versus 29% for the task-to-hand mapping. This suggests that the greater representational overlap inherent in the task-to-finger mapping increased the availability of the switch task representation, thereby promoting switching. Conversely, in Experiment 3, where participants were instructed to select tasks randomly, no significant difference in switch rates was observed between the two mapping conditions. This null finding supports the authors' hypothesis that the cognitive processes recruited to fulfill randomness instructions (such as inhibitory control) may obscure or counteract the natural influence of effector-specific task representations. These findings indicate that motor effectors are indeed a crucial component of task representations in guiding voluntary task selection. The study concludes that the way tasks are mapped to effectors changes how people mentally represent tasks, which in turn biases cognitive flexibility. Specifically, mappings that create more distinct task representations (task-to-hand) reinforce repetition biases, while those with greater overlap (task-to-finger) facilitate switching. This challenges the view that task selection is purely pre-motor and suggests that motor-specific associations are integrated into the cognitive structures that guide volitional control.

Key finding

Task-to-finger mappings, which create greater overlap in task representations, increase voluntary task switching behavior compared to task-to-hand mappings, but only when participants are not instructed to switch randomly.

Methodology

lab_experiment

Sample size: 321

Provenance

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Summary generated by qwen3.6-27b-prismaquant on 2026-06-10; verification: verified.

Topics

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• task switching