- Title
- A large-scale analysis of task switching practice effects across the lifespan
- Creator
- Steyvers, Mark; Hawkins, Guy E.; Karayanidis, Frini; Brown, Scott D.
- Relation
- ARC.DP170100756 http://purl.org/au-research/grants/arc/DP170100756 | DP180103613 http://purl.org/au-research/grants/arc/DP180103613
- Relation
- Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America Vol. 116, Issue 36, p. 17735-17740
- Publisher Link
- http://dx.doi.org/10.1073/pnas.1906788116
- Publisher
- National Academy of Sciences
- Resource Type
- journal article
- Date
- 2019
- Description
- An important feature of human cognition is the ability to flexibly and efficiently adapt behavior in response to continuously changing contextual demands. We leverage a large-scale dataset from Lumosity, an online cognitive-training platform, to investigate how cognitive processes involved in cued switching between tasks are affected by level of task practice across the adult lifespan. We develop a computational account of task switching that specifies the temporal dynamics of activating task-relevant representations and inhibiting task-irrelevant representations and how they vary with extended task practice across a number of age groups. Practice modulates the level of activation of the task-relevant representation and improves the rate at which this information becomes available, but has little effect on the task-irrelevant representation. While long-term practice improves performance across all age groups, it has a greater effect on older adults. Indeed, extensive task practice can make older individuals functionally similar to less-practiced younger individuals, especially for cognitive measures that focus on the rate at which task-relevant information becomes available.
- Subject
- task switching; cognitive control; practice effects; Bayesian modeling; aging effects
- Identifier
- http://hdl.handle.net/1959.13/1475078
- Identifier
- uon:49449
- Identifier
- ISSN:0027-8424
- Rights
- This open access article is distributed under Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives License 4.0 (CC BY-NC-ND).
- Language
- eng
- Full Text
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