Study title

The original grant that funded the collection encompasses a variety of studies. The main aim of the project was to investigate whether what we "know" and what we "do" have different effects on our subsequent behaviour investigated by looking at our ability to switch between different tasks. The data set includes trial data from seven experiments that used a cued task-switching procedure combined with a selective go/nogo procedure.Below is the original grant abstract, which encompasses a variety of studies. Please refer to Data description (abstract) for details on the two studies uploaded in this collection. In this project we will investigate whether what we "know" and what we "do" have different effects on our subsequent behaviour. We will do this by looking at our ability to switch between different tasks. Specifically, we will compare how difficult it is to switch away from a task that we have either: a) only prepared to perform (we "knew" what the relevant task was but we didn't "do" it), or ii) actually performed (we both "knew" it and "did" it). In our everyday lives we frequently need to switch between the different rules that guide our behaviour. For instance, when driving a car we might switch rapidly between the following "tasks": visually assessing potential hazards at a junction; accelerating past a tractor; performing an emergency stop. From studies using laboratory tasks, we know that switching tasks usually leads to slowed responses, and that we occasionally even repeat the previous task in error. The existence of this "switch cost" reveals that some aspect of the previous task must persist in some way to affect the speed or accuracy of our subsequent behaviour, even though we know that it is no longer relevant. In this project, we wish to find out about what causes this cost of switching between tasks. Our main question concerns whether just preparing a task ("knowing") will have different consequences from actually performing it ("doing")....