The purpose of the investigations was to dissociate processes of task preparation from task execution in the task-switching paradigm. The basic assumption was that task repetitions have 2 advantages over task shifts: an activation advantage as a result of the execution of the same task type in the pretrial, and an expectation advantage, because participants, in general, implicitly expect a repe...

Dissociation "automatico-voluntaire" is a symptom observed in aphasic patients. We elucidated the difference between voluntary and involuntary speech output in a quantitative manner using the same task materials in nine patients with Wernicke's aphasia. All the patients exhibited better ability and less paraphasias in a repetition task elicited in a disguised condition than in an ordinary repet...

Switching between two different tasks normally results in an impairment in people's performance known as a switch cost, typically measured as an increase in reaction time (RT) and errors compared to a situation in which no task switch is required. Researchers in task switching have suggested that this switch cost is the behavioural manifestation of the task set reconfiguration processes that ar...

Several task-switch studies show that response category repetition is favorable on task repetition trials, but disadvantageous on task switch trials. In the present study we investigated how this interaction depends on the type and number of involved response categories. In a dual-task number-categorization experiment, subjects had to respond to tasks T(1) and T(2) with one of the two fingers o...

The formation of cortical object representations requires the activation of cell assemblies, correlated by induced oscillatory bursts of activity > 20 Hz (induced gamma band responses; iGBRs). One marker of the functional dynamics within such cell assemblies is the suppression of iGBRs elicited by repeated stimuli. This effect is commonly interpreted as a signature of 'sharpening' processes wit...

Repetition priming refers to the change in the ability to perform a task on a stimulus as a consequence of a former encounter with that very same item. Usually, repetition results in faster and more accurate performance. In the present study, we used a contrast discrimination protocol to assess perceptual sensitivity and response bias of Gabor gratings that are either repeated (same orientation...