Task-switching cost is highly reliable in old participants. However, in a Stroop-switching paradigm that compared old musicians with old non-musicians (Experiment 1A), task-switching costs were not consistent. For non-musicians, the task-switching costs were significant in the congruent and neutral trials, but not in the incongruent trials. For musicians, the task-switching costs disappeared completely. We suspected that besides following task rules, old participants might also apply a stimulus-based strategy called the target-first strategy. In Experiment 1B and 2, participants in Experiment 1A were invited again to perform two more Stroop-switching paradigms. To encourage the participants to use task rules, in Experiment 1B we removed the neutral trials but found the same results as in Experiment 1A. In Experiment 2, when inserting a cue-target interval in the Stroop-switching paradigm, both musicians and non-musicians produced reliable task-switching costs in all trial conditions. Note that younger participants had reliable task-switching costs in Experiment 1B and 2. We suggest that older participants preferred the target-first strategy to the task rules-based strategy because the former was easy to implant although it was less flexible. Besides task-switching costs, we found that old musicians had less interference effect than old non-musicians in Experiment 1B. In all three experiments, old musicians had shorter RTs than old non-musicians, which might be due to differences in strategies apart from cognitive abilities. We propose that without considering the strategy preference, some previous studies might misestimate the difference between old and young participants in terms of task-switching performance and interference control.

在老参与者中，任务转换成本非常可靠。但是，在将老音乐家与老非音乐家进行比较的Stroop-switching范式中（实验1A），任务转换成本并不一致。对于非音乐家，任务转换成本在同等和中立的试验中是巨大的，而在不一致的试验中则不然。对于音乐人来说，任务转换成本完全消失了。我们怀疑，除了遵循任务规则外，老参与者还可能会采用一种基于刺激的策略，即目标优先策略。在实验1B和2中，再次邀请实验1A的参与者执行另外两个Stroop-switching范例。为了鼓励参与者使用任务规则，在实验1B中，我们删除了中性试验，但发现的结果与实验1A相同。在实验2中，在Stroop-switching范式中插入提示目标间隔时，无论是音乐家还是非音乐家，在所有试用条件下都产生了可靠的任务切换成本。请注意，在实验1B和2中，较年轻的参与者具有可靠的任务转换成本。我们建议，较老的参与者更喜欢目标优先策略而不是基于任务规则的策略，因为前者易于植入，尽管灵活性较差。除了任务转换成本外，我们在实验1B中发现，老年音乐家比老年非音乐家有更少的干扰效果。在所有三个实验中，老音乐家的RT均比非音乐家的RT短，这可能是由于除认知能力之外的策略差异所致。我们建议，在不考虑策略偏好的情况下，