Project Details
Projekt
From representation to action: Uncovering how task representations shape voluntary task choice
Subject Area
General, Cognitive and Mathematical Psychology
Term
since 2026
Project identifier
Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 564829065
A central question in cognitive psychology is how mental representations influence behavior, particularly when individuals navigate the everyday challenges of managing multiple tasks. Early task-switching research introduced the concept of a "task set" and largely focused on the mechanisms involved in switching tasks (e.g., Allport et al., 1995; Rogers & Monsell, 1995). However, these studies provided limited insights into how tasks are mentally represented and, conversely, how task representations influence task-switching behavior. Others (e.g., Dreisbach, 2012; Gilbert & Shallice, 2002; Herd et al., 2014; Musslick & Cohen, 2021) have suggested that the way in which tasks are represented critically influences our ability to switch between tasks. Yet relatively little is known about how these representations emerge and how they shape our willingness to change tasks. In this project, we aim to close this gap by combining behavioral experiments with neural network modeling. Specifically, we will compare performance between groups that have to respond to the same set of four unique words written in one color and another four works written in a different color with either a left- or right-hand response. Critically, one group only gets information about the single stimulus-response mappings, the other group additionally receives two categorization rules (with the color as task cue) that help grouping stimuli belonging to one or the other response. Previous research suggests that participants informed about the underlying task rules rely less on individual stimulus-response associations (as evidenced by robust (color) switch costs) whereas those informed only about stimulus-response mappings perform faster but show no switch costs. This project investigates how task representations emerge and how they affect task choice. Tasks will be defined as (two-choice) categorization rules that define a response discriminating stimulus feature like for example whether a word starts with a consonant or a vowel or whether it is animate or not. Additionally, we will examine how task representations, once established, are updated or modified in response to new stimuli that violate the established representation (e.g. when a new word stimulus has to be answered with the „wrong“, task-rule-incongruent response). Finally, we will explore how task representations are individually formed based on prior similarity judgments of stimuli. Each behavioral experiment will be complemented by computational simulations of a connectionist model, offering mechanistic accounts of how different patterns of behavior emerge from varying representations of stimuli and tasks. Taken together this project aims to elucidate the cognitive and computational mechanisms underlying the relationship between task representations and task switching behavior, providing new insights into how people flexibly adapt to changing task demands and choose between tasks.
DFG Programme
Research Units
