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In everyday life humans are confronted with changing environmental demands. In order to act successfully and achieve intended goals, action control is required. A recent approach, the Binding and Retrieval in Action Control (BRAC) framework, attempts to provide an overarching perspective on action control. Based on basic principles such as binding and retrieval, findings from several experimental paradigms could be integrated. However, the focus so far has been on rather artificial paradigms involving very simple motor response requirements, like finger lifting or button presses. We aimed to extend the BRAC framework to more complex movements consisting of a sequence of several discrete actions. Participants were asked to grasp and lift an object with an uneven mass distribution. Object features, like mass distribution and position, were either kept constant on a global level or varied in a pseudorandomized manner. When both object features were kept constant, participants were able to adjust their grasp so that it resulted in a more stable lift and less object roll. Further, with randomly mixed object features, we found best task performance when both object features were completely repeated from one trial to the other. These results suggest that tasks with more complex movements are capable of reflecting principles of action control as defined by the BRAC framework. This offers the possibility to test these principles in even more complex and ecologically relevant paradigms to improve our understanding of everyday life actions.

Multilinguals often switch between the languages they speak. One open question is to what extent they can use anticipatory—or proactive—language control to reduce interference from non-target languages during language switching. In three experiments, unbalanced German-English bilinguals (N1 = 24; N2 = 35; N3 = 37) named pictures in their L1 or L2 in mixed blocks. In all but the penultimate block, the language sequence in which pictures were named was predictable (e.g., L1, L1, L2, L2, etc.), thus allowing participants to prepare for upcoming trials. Performance in the non-predictable block was compared to average performance in predictable sequence blocks right before and after, thus controlling for practice effects. We predicted that language switching would be facilitated during predictable language trials, indicative of proactive language control. However, for Experiments 1–2, there was no evidence for a predictability benefit across both experiments. When the number of items that had to be switched between was reduced to two (Experiment 3), a limited repetition-specific predictability effect emerged. These findings suggest that people do not use preparatory processes endogenously on the basis of regularities in the language sequence to reduce interference during language switching, unless the specific item that needs to be produced can be anticipated.

There is strong evidence that stimuli and responses are bound together in a direct ('binary') fashion into an episodic representation called 'stimulus-response episode' (or 'event file'). However, in an auditory negative priming study in which participants were required to respond to the target stimulus and to ignore the distractor stimulus, context information (i.e., a completely task-irrelevant stimulus) was found to rather modulate the binding between the distractor stimulus and the response, instead of entering into a binary binding with the response itself (Mayr et al., 2018). The current study demonstrates that simply increasing the variability of the context across trials leads to a binary binding between the context and the response. The same auditory negative priming task was implemented, and participants were either assigned to the high-variability group (8 different context sounds) or the low-variability group (2 different context sounds). For the low-variability group, results replicated previous findings of contextual modulation of the binding between the distractor stimulus and the response. For the high-variability group, however, repetition of the context per se retrieved the prime response, indicating a binary binding between the context and the response. Together, the current findings provide evidence that the inter-trial variability of context information is a determinant of how context is bound in a stimulus-response episode. Possible underlying mechanisms are discussed.

Evidence suggests that the features of a stimulus and the actions performed on it are bound together into a coherent mental representation of the episode, which is retrieved from memory upon reencountering at least one of these features. Effects of such binding and retrieval processes emerge in action control, such as in multitasking situations like task switching. In the task-switching paradigm, response-repetition benefits are observed in task repetitions, but response-repetition costs in task switches. This interaction of task repetition (vs. switch) with response repetition (vs. switch) may be explained in terms of task-response binding. In two experiments, we included a task-irrelevant contextual feature in a cued task-switching paradigm using word identification tasks. In Experiment 1, the cue modality could vary between visual and auditory; in Experiment 2, the cue language could vary between English and Spanish, while the target stimulus was always presented visually and in German. We predicted that repeating the contextual feature in the subsequent trial would retrieve the features of the previous trial, even though cue modality or cue language did not afford any response and were not associated with either task. The results showed that response repetition-benefits in task repetitions were observable when the context (i.e., the modality or the language of the cue) repeated but disappeared when the context switched from the previous trial. These results are consistent with context-specific binding and retrieval processes in task switching.

This article details a correction to: Gade, M., Declerck, M., Philipp, A. M., Rey-Mermet, A., & Koch, I. (2021). Assessing the Evidence for Asymmetrical Switch Costs and Reversed Language Dominance Effects – A Meta-Analysis. 'Journal of Cognition, 4'(1), 55. DOI: 'http://doi.org/10.5334/joc.186'

Two seemingly counterintuitive phenomena – asymmetrical language switch costs and the reversed language dominance effect – prove to be particularly controversial in the literature on language control. Asymmetrical language switch costs refer to the larger costs for switching into the dominant language compared to switching into the less dominant language, both relative to staying in either one language. The reversed language dominance effect refers to longer reaction times when in the more dominant of the two languages in situations that require frequent language switching (i.e., mixed-language blocks). The asymmetrical language switch costs are commonly taken as an index for processes of transient, reactive inhibitory language control, whereas the reversed language dominance effect is taken as an index for sustained, proactive inhibitory language control. In the present meta-analysis, we set out to establish the empirical evidence for these two phenomena using a Bayesian linear mixed effects modelling approach. Despite the observation of both phenomena in some studies, our results suggest that overall, there is little evidence for the generality and robustness of these two effects, and this holds true even when conditions – such as language proficiency and preparation time manipulations – were included as moderators of these phenomena. We conclude that asymmetrical switch costs and the reversed language dominance effect are important for theory development, but their utility for theory testing is limited due to their lack of robustness and the absence of confirmed moderatory variables.

Modality compatibility refers to the similarity between the stimulus modality and the modality of response-related sensory consequences (e.g., vocal output produces audible effects). While previous studies found higher costs of task switching with stimulus-response modality-incompatible tasks (auditory-manual and visual-vocal), the present study was aimed to explore the generality of modality compatibility by examining a new response modality (pedal responses). Experiment 1 showed that the effect of modality compatibility generalizes to pedal responses when these replaced manual responses used in previous studies (i.e., higher switch costs when switching between auditory-pedal and visual-vocal tasks compared to switching between auditory-vocal and visual-pedal tasks). However, in single-task conditions there was no influence of modality compatibility. Experiment 2 was designed to examine whether modality compatibility depends on the frequency of task switches. To this end, one task occurred very frequently, overall decreasing the task switching frequency. Importantly, the results showed a robust task-switching benefit of modality-compatible mappings even for a highly frequent task, suggesting that the sustained representation of potentially competing response modalities affects task-switching performance independent from the actual frequency of the tasks. Together, the data suggest that modality compatibility is an emergent phenomenon arising in task-switching situations based on the necessity to maintain but at the same time separate competing modality mappings, which are characterized by ideomotor ‘‘backward’’ linkages between anticipated response effects and the stimuli that called for this response in the first place.

Commentary on Schmidt, Liefooghe & De Houwer (2020, JoC): “An episodic model of task switching effects: Erasing the homunculus from memory”.