Rethinking attentional reset: Task sets determine the boundaries of adaptive control

Abstract

Adaptive control processes that minimise distraction often operate in a context-specific manner. For example, they may minimise distraction from irrelevant conversations during a lecture but not in the hallway afterwards. It remains unclear, however, whether (a) salient perceptual features or (b) task sets based on such features serve as contextual boundaries for adaptive control in standard distractor-interference tasks. To distinguish between these possibilities, we manipulated whether the structure of a standard, visual distractor-interference task allowed (Experiment 1) or did not allow (Experiment 2) participants to associate salient visual features (i.e., colour patches and colour words) with different task sets. We found that changing salient visual features across consecutive trials reduced a popular measure of adaptive control in distractor-interference tasks—the congruency sequence effect (CSE)—only when the task structure allowed participants to associate these visual features with different task sets. These findings extend prior support for the task set hypothesis from somewhat atypical cross-modal tasks to a standard unimodal task. In contrast, they pose a challenge to an alternative “attentional reset” hypothesis, and related views, wherein changing salient perceptual features always results in a contextual boundary for the CSE.