Diagnosing Serial and Parallel Processing of Cues and Targets in the Explicit Task-Cuing Procedure

Abstract

The current studies used the explicit task cuing procedure in which subjects performed parity and magnitude judgments on target number words as indicated by a cue word that appeared on each trial. In two task switching experiments, we independently degraded the cue words and target number words in two ways—reduced brightness and contrast (Experiment 1) and character substitution (Experiment 2)—and manipulated cue-target interval (CTI) to determine if the serial processing assumption common to models of executive control is valid. Experiment 1 exhibited a significant interaction between cue and target degradation and non-significant interaction between CTI and stimulus degradation. Experiment 2 exhibited a non-significant interaction between cue and target degradation but a significant interaction between CTI and cue degradation. These different results suggest that processing of cues and targets depends upon degradation and the amount of time subjects have to prepare for the second stimulus.