Kate Arrington
Department of Psychology
Lehigh University

Research Interests


For much of the history of human inquiry, questions of will and choice have been the purview of philosophers and theologians. Applying scientific methods to the study of volitional behavior presents a challenge: The control inherent in scientific investigation limits participants’ free will. Faced with this dilemma, psychologists have danced around issues of voluntary control of behavior. However, a hallmark of human behavior is the flexibility to choose how to respond or even not to respond to stimuli in our environments. This choice of action requires executive control of a cognitive system designed to receive signals from the external world, integrate these signals with internal information and goals, and generate behavior. The mechanisms of cognitive control that allow for this flexible behavior within a complex world are only beginning to be understood (Brass & Haggard, 2008; Miller & Cohen, 2001). The questions that drive my research are at the core of the scientific study of cognitive control. What are the interactions between stimulus-driven and goal-directed forces that determine cognitive control? Why does the ability to implement cognitive control vary across individuals and across time and situations within the same individuals? What are the mental representations and processes that guide task selection and performance? While my research is primarily aimed at understanding cognitive functioning through analyses of behavioral data and mathematical modeling, I have strong interests in studying the neural basis of cognition and am pursuing these interests through collaborations involving functional neuroimaging research. I believe that the converging methodologies approach that defines the field of cognitive neuroscience provides an investigative environment where knowledge of neural function can inform cognitive theory.


Multitask environments are ideal situations in which to study executive control. When multiple behavioral paths are available, cognitive control is necessary to coordinate input of perceptual information, retrieve information from memory, and direct behavior to competing tasks. Task switching methodologies are widely used to study control processes; however, they are limited in their application to the study of voluntary behavior, because the experiment typically dictates the task to be performed on each trial. In response to this limitation, I developed the voluntary task switching (VTS) paradigm during my postdoctoral fellowship with Gordon Logan (Arrington & Logan, 2004-a; 2005 see accompanying materials). In VTS, participants are provided with multivalent stimuli and allowed to choose what task to perform on each trial. Typically, the participants are instructed to perform each task equally often and in a random order. These instructions are intended to encourage participants to actively choose the task to perform on every trial and to discourage them from selecting a strategy of performing one task for a large number of trials or alternating strictly between tasks. Within this paradigm, task performance measures of reaction time (RT) and accuracy show costs in performance associated with switching tasks. As in standard task switching studies, these switch costs likely reflect a variety of processes including time needed to establish a new mental set, or task set (Rogers & Monsell, 1995), and competing activation from recently active task sets (Allport, et al., 1994), but may also include choice costs (Arrington & Logan, 2005). VTS also provides measures of task choice. Choice behavior is reflected both in the particular task participants choose on a given trial type and in the transitions they make between tasks, or the switch probability. The ability of this procedure to measure both task choice and task performance provides a comprehensive approach to the study of cognitive control processes engaged during volitional, multitask behavior. The idea that control processes may serve distinct roles of “endogenous control of task set, in the sense of controlling which task is performed” and “‘task readiness’ …measured by speed of performance” (Allport & Wylie, 2000) has been largely ignored in the standard task switching literature over the past decade. In my own work, I consider a distinction between task selection and task preparation. Task selection refers to the intent to perform a particular task and the associated activation of a task-level representation. Task preparation refers to the activation of the task set in terms of the attention, decision, and response parameters necessary to perform the task. Ongoing research in my lab is aimed at understanding these processes and specifying a model of behavior in multitask environments.    Current Projects

Volitional control over planned sequences of actions using a voluntary task span procedure

The balance of goal-directed and stimulus-driven influences on task selection in tasks with unequal task difficulty



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Last updated 4/1/13