The role of temporal cue-target overlap in backward inhibition under task switching

Abstract

One of the proposed mechanisms for sequential control in task-shift conditions is backward inhibition (BI), which is usually measured in terms of lag-2 task repetition costs in A-B-A task sequences relative to C-B-A task sequences. By considering the so far existing experiments it seems that these lag-2 repetition costs occur only with temporally overlapping cues and targets. In the present study this issue was further examined in two experiments, in which temporal cue target overlap was varied blockwise (Experiment 1) and from trial-to-trial (Experiment 2). Experiment 1 shows that lag-2 repetition effects can only be observed with temporally overlapping cues and targets, indicating that there was no BI with temporally separated cues and targets. However, the results of Experiment 2 suggest that both irrelevant task sets are inhibited in this case, and that with temporally overlapping cues and targets only the previously relevant task set is inhibited.