Frontiers in Aging Neuroscience Aging Neuroscience
It is suggested that task naming is a suitable cognitive intervention for enhancing the control of task switching in younger and older adults, even if memory load is reduced, and that for the efficient application of this strategy it first has to be coordinated with task switching, which is easier when task switching is already practiced.
Abstract
perform two or more simple categorization tasks, such as classifying the value of digits as odd or even (task A) and the color of digits as red or green (task B). In single-task blocks, they have to perform only one of the two tasks (task A or B), and in mixed-task blocks, they have to switch between both tasks A and B. This design allows calculating two types of task-switching costs: Mixing costs (or gen-eral/global switch costs) are defined as the difference in performance between single-and mixed-task blocks, and are assumed to measure the general switching ability, that is, maintaining two task sets and selecting between them. Switching costs (or specific/local switch costs) are defined as the difference in performance between switch trials (i.e., switching from A to B or B to A) and non-switch trials (repeating task A or B) within mixed-task blocks (cf. Rogers and Monsell, 1995). Switching costs are supposed to measure the ability to switch tasks at trial-to-trial transitions, that is, at a more local level of switching. Most of the aging studies so far have shown that age differences are much more pronounced for mixing costs than for switching costs, suggesting that older adults primarily have deficits with the task-set maintenance and selection, and less with the switching process itself.