The Timing of Context-Triggered Retrieval Processes in Task Switching: Constant Context Presentation

Recent task-switching studies highlighted the presence of feature binding processes. These studies documented that even a task-irrelevant feature (the context, henceforth) may be bound with the task and the response in each trial. When the context repeated in the following trial, it supposedly retrieved the bound features, causing benefits when the task and the response repeated and costs otherwise (i.e. full repetition benefits). In these studies, the full repetition benefits when the context repeated were found only when the context appeared together with the task cue and not with the target (Benini et al., 2023), or before the target and not with the target in an experiment without cues (Benini et al., 2024). Taken together this suggests that the context needs to appear early enough during the trial timeline to yield binding effects. However, in these studies, a delayed context onset always implied a shorter context presentation duration. In the present experiment, therefore, we introduce a stimulus-onset asynchrony (SOA) manipulation between the cue and the context onset. Specifically, we investigate the effect of presenting the context before, with, or after the cue but keeping constant the total context presentation duration.