Authors: Thomas Kleinsorge Patrick D Gajewski
Publish Date: 2005/04/26
Volume: 70, Issue: 3, Pages: 157-169
Abstract
A number of recent studies casts doubt on the empirical separability of processes of task preparation from the actual execution of the respective task We report two experiments in which we separated the precueing of a task from its execution by an intervening task In addition for the precued task we employed imperative stimuli that in most cases were associated with a competing task making the execution of this task dependent on an internal representation of the information provided by the precue Under these conditions the performance of the intervening task suffered specific interference as a function of its relation to the precued task This suggests that the encoding of the precue resulted in specific preparation for the precued task Furthermore the transition between the intervening task and the precued task was associated with relatively small costs that did not vary as a function of the interval that separated the two tasks This also suggests that a great deal of preparation for the second task already took place during the encoding of the precue Further observations suggest that the resolution of the interference between a memorybased task representation as well as a perceptually induced task representation and the representation of the currently relevant task took place on the level of individual task featuresThe research reported in this article was supported by grant Kl 1205/22 of the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft We thank Andreas Volgmann for providing the software Petra Wallmeyer and Florian Grothaus for running the experiments and Fabian Lotz for assistance in data analysis
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