Priming or executive control? Associative priming of cue encoding increases “switch costs” in the explicit task-cuing procedure

The explicit task-cuing procedure involves presenting a cue that indicates which task to perform on a target. Responses are typically faster when tasks repeat than when they alternate, and this difference is often interpreted as a measure of the time required for executive control processes to change task set. This article suggests that the difference reflects priming of cue encoding when successive cues are identical or associatively related. Subjects responded to task repetitions more quickly when the cue on the current trial was associatively related to the cue on the previous trial (e.g.,day →night) than when the cues were unrelated (e.g.,verb →night). Models applied to the time course function—generated by manipulating the interval between the onsets of the cue and the target—showed that the facilitation was due to cue encoding, a process that does not require online executive control.