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No differences in dual-task costs between forced- and free-choice tasks

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Abstract

Humans appear to act in response to environmental demands or to pursue self-chosen goals. In the laboratory, these situations are often investigated with forced- and free-choice tasks: in forced-choice tasks, a stimulus determines the one correct response, while in free-choice tasks the participants choose between response alternatives. We compared these two tasks regarding their susceptibility to dual-task interference when the concurrent task was always forced-choice. If, as was suggested in the literature, both tasks require different “action control systems,” larger dual-task costs for free-choice tasks than for forced-choice tasks should emerge in our experiments, due to a time-costly switch between the systems. In addition, forced-choice tasks have been conceived as “prepared reflexes” for which all intentional processing is said to take place already prior to stimulus onset giving rise to automatic response initiation upon stimulus onset. We report three experiments with different implementations of the forced- vs. free-choice manipulation. In all experiments we replicated slower responses in the free- than in the forced-choice task and the typical dual-task costs. These latter costs, however, were equivalent for forced- and free-choice tasks. These results are easier to reconcile with the assumption of one unitary “action control system.”

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Notes

  1. In addition, the stimulus-locked lateralized readiness potential has been shown to be larger in forced-choice compared to free-choice tasks in one study (Waszak et al., 2005), but not in another (Keller et al., 2006).

  2. The term “action control systems” is still a bit vague. In our understanding, it refers to two largely different neural networks responsible for carrying out one action type or the other. When referring to this literature, we will, however, continue to use the term “system” although our data does not speak to the neural substrates.

  3. We will discuss one special case of parallel processing in the “General Discussion”.

  4. Another difference between the forced- and free-choice tasks used in Experiment 1 relates to the fact that the forced-choice task entailed a “consistent mapping” of stimuli and responses, while the free-choice task can be construed as entailing a “varied mapping”: to the same stimulus different responses are required. There is evidence for automatic retrieval of responses and/or tasks upon stimulus perception from the task-switching literature (e.g., Koch, Prinz, & Allport, 2005; Waszak, Hommel, & Allport, 2003), and thus the free-choice stimulus might re-activate the last response associatively and lead to increased response conflict. With the design we used in Experiment 2 and 3, this additional difference should be less pronounced.

  5. If one views forced- vs. free-choice tasks as a continuum, this particular task might be a shift toward the forced-choice pole because it requires extracting the two possible stimuli and the respective responses. Still, however, it requires a “free-choice” between the two possible responses.

  6. Against this background, it should be noted again that the simplified (and theoretical) distinction we have made here by contrasting stimulus- and goal-driven actions does not imply “real”, conceptual differences—the interpretation made here even argues against it. Rather, this terminology should only highlight the aspect that determines the accuracy or appropriateness of the emitted action. As both require at least an intention-in-action, the term “intention-based” to characterize only actions operationalized by free-choice tasks (Herwig et al., 2007; Keller et al., 2006; Waszak et al., 2005) is thus incomplete and potentially misleading.

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Acknowledgment

This research was funded by the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG; German Research Council), Project JA 2307/1-1, awarded to Markus Janczyk. We thank Iring Koch and an anonymous reviewer for valuable comments and suggestions on a previous version of this manuscript.

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  1. Department of Psychology III, University of Würzburg, Röntgenring 11, 97070, Würzburg, Germany

    Markus Janczyk

  2. Department of Psychology, University of Montreal, Montreal, Canada

    Sophie Nolden & Pierre Jolicoeur

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  1. Markus Janczyk
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Janczyk, M., Nolden, S. & Jolicoeur, P. No differences in dual-task costs between forced- and free-choice tasks. Psychological Research 79, 463–477 (2015). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00426-014-0580-6

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