Cognitive control processes that enable purposeful behavior are often context-specific. A teenager, for example, may inhibit the tendency to daydream at work but not in the classroom. However, the nature of contextual boundaries for cognitive control processes remains unclear. Therefore, we revisited an ongoing controversy over whether such boundaries reflect (a) an attentional reset that occurs whenever a context-defining (e.g., sensory) feature changes or (b) a disruption of episodic memory retrieval that occurs only when the updated context-defining feature is linked to a different task set. To distinguish between these hypotheses, we used a cross-modal distractor-interference task to determine precisely when changing a salient context-defining feature-the sensory modality in which task stimuli appear-bounds control processes underlying the congruency sequence effect (CSE). Consistent with the task set hypothesis, but not with the attentional reset hypothesis, Experiments 1 and 2 revealed that changing the sensory modality in which task stimuli appear eliminates the CSE only when the task structure enables participants to form modality-specific task sets. Experiment 3 further revealed that such "modality-specific" CSEs are associated with orienting attention to the sensory modality in which task stimuli appear, which may facilitate the formation of a modality-specific task set. These findings support the view that task sets serve as boundaries for the CSE. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2020 APA, all rights reserved).

中文翻译：

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任务集充当一致性序列效果的边界。

能够实现有目的的行为的认知控制过程通常是特定于上下文的。例如，青少年可能会抑制在工作中做白日梦的趋势，但在教室中却没有。但是，认知控制过程的上下文边界的性质仍然不清楚。因此，我们重新审视了有关此类边界是否反映（a）每当上下文定义（例如，感觉）特征更改时发生的注意重置，或（b）仅在更新的上下文更新时才发生的情景记忆检索中断的争论，定义功能链接到另一个任务集。为了区分这些假设，我们使用跨模式干扰因素干扰任务来准确确定何时更改显着的上下文定义特征-任务刺激出现的感觉模态-限制了一致性序列效应（CSE）的控制过程。与任务集假设一致，但与注意重设假设不一致，实验1和2发现，只有当任务结构使参与者能够形成特定于模态的任务集时，改变出现任务刺激的感觉方式才能消除CSE。实验3进一步揭示，这种“特定于模式的” CSE与将注意力转移到出现任务刺激的感觉模态有关，这可能有助于形成特定于模态的任务集。这些发现支持以下观点：任务集是CSE的边界。