ORIGINAL RESEARCH article
Front. Hum. Neurosci.
Sec. Cognitive Neuroscience
Volume 19 - 2025 | doi: 10.3389/fnhum.2025.1570551
This article is part of the Research TopicModern applications of EEG in neurological and cognitive researchView all 11 articles
Exploring the Impact of Compound Retrieval Strategy in the Task-switching Paradigm
Provisionally accepted
- Shanghai University of Sport, Shanghai, China
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Task-switching costs are commonly used to measure cognitive control.However, previous research has shown that when participants are not explicitly instructed on task rules, they can adopt the compound retrieval strategy in taskswitching paradigms with limited targets, where task-switching costs cannot reflect cognitive control. Nevertheless, it remains unclear whether participants would spontaneously use the compound retrieval strategy when they are explicitly instructed on task rules. This study aimed to investigate this issue. In the experiment, 36 participants were recruited to complete two conditions: the four-target condition, in which only four targets were presented and repeated throughout the experiment, and the infinite-target condition, where targets were not repeated. The results revealed that, compared to the infinite-target condition, task-switching costs were smaller, while response-congruency effects and the N2 difference wave (incongruent trialscongruent trials) were larger in the four-target condition. These findings suggest that participants spontaneously use the compound retrieval strategy in the task-switching paradigm with limited targets.
Keywords: compound retrieval strategy, task-switching paradigm, ERP, N2, switch positivity
Received: 03 Feb 2025; Accepted: 14 Jul 2025.
Copyright: © 2025 Zhou. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) or licensor are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.
* Correspondence: Fang yuan Zhou, Shanghai University of Sport, Shanghai, China
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