The dynamic transfer of adaptive control in task switching: Event-related potential evidence

Adaptive control refers to the dynamic regulation of cognitive processes in response to changing environmental demands. Previous studies demonstrated that the proportion of task switches or response variations can induce adaptive control. However, the extent to which adaptive control is transferred across different contexts remains poorly understood. The present study employed a confound-minimized design comprising two inducer contexts (one with 100 % response repeats and the other with 100 % response changes within a series of task-repeat trials preceding task-switch trials) and a diagnostic list with 50 % response changes. Event-related potentials (ERP) results revealed that: (1) both cue-locked switch-related positivity and stimulus-locked switch-related negativity were attenuated in the response-change inducer context compared to the response-repeat inducer context; and (2) in the diagnostic list, the influence of the inducer context was exclusively observed in the cue-locked P3 component. These results indicate that adaptive control triggered by the high frequency of response changes during task-repetition trials can be transferred to a different context and can modulate the proactive control of task switching in the new context.