Repeating Task-Irrelevant Contexts Does Not Bias Task Choice and Performance in Voluntary Task Switching

Goal-directed behaviour requires both efficient task execution as well as adequate task choice. Task choice may reflect deliberate evaluation of costs and benefits, but it may also be biased by bottom-up memory retrieval. Specifically, re-encountering a previously experienced context could retrieve a prior task choice, thereby influencing subsequent decisions. In the present study, using the voluntary task-switching (VTS) paradigm, we examined whether repeating a context would retrieve a task by manipulating whether a task-irrelevant context stimulus repeated or changed across consecutive trials. Based on a feature binding and episodic retrieval framework, we hypothesized that the context—albeit task irrelevant—could become bound with the task in each trial. Consequently, repeating the context would retrieve or reactivate the previous-trial task. Therefore, we predicted that context repetitions would increase task-repetition rates and task-repetition benefits. We used an adaptive VTS procedure (Mittelstädt, Miller, & Kiesel, 2018), wherein the onset of the stimulus affording a task repetition is delayed compared to the stimulus affording a task switch. The delay between the stimuli increases for every consecutive task repetition. We included a task-irrelevant context (a coloured box in Experiments 1 and 2, or a picture in Experiment 3) that could switch or repeat unpredictably in each trial. Contrary to the predictions, we found no evidence that repeating a task-irrelevant context affected either task choice or performance, even when context saliency was enhanced in Experiment 3. We discuss these findings in light of the interplay of performance optimization and task-set availability in VTS.