Topic: switch costs

Older adults show deficits in tasks of set-shifting. Yet, many underlying cognitive functions are required during such tasks and it is currently unknown which of these mechanisms may be deficient in older age. Here, we investigated this question in a preliminary dataset of 45 young participants (age: 25.2 ± 4.3) and 26 older participants (age: 68.1 ± 5.0) in an EEG-compatible set-shifting paradigm. We were particularly interested in two posterior components: 1) The P300 is a positive component that appears approximately 300 ms to 500 ms after the cue and has a lower amplitude during set-shifti

Flexibly switching between tasks is crucial for goal-directed adaptive behavior. Task switches require inhibition of the no-longer relevant and updating of the newly relevant task set, resulting in lower performance on trials requiring a task switch vs. repetition (i.e., switch costs). While children show greater switch costs than adults, theorized to be partly due to less distinct task-set representations, age differences can be mitigated by training. Studies in adults suggest that neural task-set representations become more distinct with training, enabling more effective processing in the la