Affective-Motivational Task Content and Stimulus Size Modulate Cognitive Control in Task Switching

We investigated how cognitive control is modulated by the affective-motivational properties of food stimuli and their visual size. Prior research showed reduced switch costs - i.e., smaller costs in switch than in repetition trials - for food-related tasks compared to food-unrelated tasks. This raises the question of whether such effects are driven by the affective-motivational salience of food stimuli, by their visual salience due to larger size, or by an interaction of both factors. We addressed this using a task-switching paradigm in which participants alternated between a food categorization task (sweet/savory) and a digit categorization task (odd/even). The food stimulus was superimposed on the digit stimulus, and visual size was inverted compared to earlier studies, making the digit visually salient. Despite its smaller size, the food task still yielded reduced switch costs, suggesting that this effect cannot be attributed to visual salience. However, a direct comparison with prior findings revealed that visual size modulates the magnitude of the switch-cost asymmetry. This suggests that food stimuli improve task-set reconfiguration, but that visual salience likely plays a modulatory role. These findings indicate the need to consider motivational and perceptual factors in cognitive control research.