Task-goal switching: Influences of time, language, alertness and expertise

• Main Author: Slama, Hichem
• Other Authors: Peigneux, Philippe
• Format: Doctoral Thesis
• Language: en
• Published: Universite Libre de Bruxelles 2016
• Subjects: Neurosciences cognitives; Psychologie cognitive; Neuropsychologie; cognitive control; task switching; language; expertise; alertness; sleep; executive functions
• Online Access: http://hdl.handle.net/2013/ULB-DIPOT:oai:dipot.ulb.ac.be:2013/229285

Almost 100 years ago, Jersild (1927) published his article “Mental Set and Shift”. He borrowed this title from a book of Hollingworth and Poffenberger (1919), according to whom “shifting back and forth from one mental set, one attitude or one task to another, is a relatively ineffective mode of work.” As pointed out by Jersild, the cost of switching between activities or mental sets is, for instance, the reason for Taylor’s model of industrialization and the trend in industry toward specialization. Through specialization, the element of switch is reduced to its minimum because “the cost of shift is loss in efficiency” (Jersild, 1927). However, outside of the factory, switching between multiple tasks is a crucial part of human life and the cost of switching, consequently, impacts our everyday functioning.The main topic of this doctoral dissertation is cognitive flexibility and task switching. The task-switching paradigm requires participants to switch frequently between tasks. Therefore, it measures the capacity of our brain to adapt rapidly according to tasks and goals. Dynamic adaptation according to context and goals is encompassed in cognitive psychology and neurosciences under the term cognitive control. Consequently, the ability to switch between tasks constitutes the part of cognitive control that is needed when the current goal changes and the cognitive system has to adapt. Our experimental contribution aimed at investigating how this task-goal switching can be modulated by factors such as time, language, alertness and expertise. In this introduction, we succinctly review the vast literature about attentional systems, cognitive control and task switching. In the experimental section, we describe the cued match-to-sample task that we developed to investigate task-goal switching and present five experimental studies that address the impact of several factors on task-goal switching. In the general discussion, we summarize our results and consider their implications for cognitive-control and task-switching literatures. === Doctorat en Sciences psychologiques et de l'éducation === info:eu-repo/semantics/nonPublished