Preregistration. Context-Triggered Retrieval in Task Switching: Advancing a Hybrid Binding–Inhibition Account

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). Previous work suggested that full repetition benefits when the context repeated were found only when the context appeared early enough during the trial timeline to yield binding effects (Benini et al., 2023, 2024). However, in these studies, a delayed context onset implied a shorter context presentation duration (with one exception, namely Exp. 2 of Benini et al., 2023). This is the second of two experiments, where we introduced 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. The results of Experiment 1 show no effect of the SOA. Note, however, that we could not replicate the full repetition benefits in the reaction times; rather, we observed in the error rates that repeating a context increased the response-repetition costs in task switches. Therefore, in the present study we investigate the robustness of these results (i.e., no effect of SOA and an increase of response-repetition costs with a context repetition), in particular emphasizing both accuracy and speed equally in the instructions.