Temporal Dynamics of Parametric Task Switching

Poster Session A - Saturday, April 13, 2024, 2:30 – 4:30 pm EDT, Sheraton Hall ABC

Bettina Bustos¹ (bettinanicolebustos@gmail.com), Eliot Hazeltine¹, J. Toby Mordkoff¹, Jiefeng Jiang¹; ¹University of Iowa, Psychological and Brain Sciences

Deficits in cognitive flexibility and task switching are found in a wide range of common mental disorders such as anxiety, depression, OCD, and ADHD (Park et al., 2017; Gu et al., 2008). Successful task switches require resolving the interference from the old task and/or reconfiguring the representation of the new task, both of which rely on how task representations are organized in the brain. Here we leverage the high temporal resolution of electroencephalography (EEG) and a parametric task switch paradigm (Bustos et al., 2023) to investigate the temporal dynamics of task reconfiguration to provide a metric of the geometry of task representations (i.e., how tasks are organized in relation to one another). We hypothesize that neural task presentations are organized based on their similarity. In the context of task switching, shifting between similar tasks will incur reduced task reconfiguration and task switch costs. To test this hypothesis, we acquired EEG data from 40 subjects. Preliminary results show increased correlation between task similarity using EEG measures and conceptual task similarity during the time course of task execution. Furthermore, we expect that the EEG measures capture the reconfiguration of task representation from the previous to the current task and that the reconfiguration is longer for task switch between more distinct tasks. These data will reveal the temporal dynamics of task switch within a given trial in a fine-grained manner.

Topic Area: EXECUTIVE PROCESSES: Goal maintenance & switching