Kate Arrington
Department of Psychology
Lehigh University

Research Interests

General Interests
The functioning of the mind and the neural systems that underly these mental processes are "vast and intricate beyond the imagination" (with thanks to J.R.R. Tolkien for this phrase.)  My wonder at the workings of the mind is equalled in my appreciation for the art of scientific investigation.  I have a broad range of research interests that generally fall under the headings of cognitive psychology and cognitive neuroscience.
 

Current Projects

Volitional control over thought and behavior is a hallmark of human cognition. Such behavioral choice requires 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 questions that drive my research are at the core of the scientific study of cognitive control. Why do we choose to act on some stimuli in the environment and not others?  What are the interactions between stimulus-driven and goal-directed forces that determine behavioral choice?  Why do individuals differ in their ability to implement cognitive control?  
The somewhat ironic thing about most task switching experiments is that researchers are studying cognitive control in a highly controlled environment in which the participant actually has very little choice in and control over how they are going to behave.  In collaboration with Gordon Logan, I developed a modified version of the task switching paradigm where participants actually make choices about which task to perform (Arrington & Logan, 2004; 2005).  In this voluntary task switching (VTS) procedure, subjects are instructed to perform each of the possible tasks equally often and to perform the tasks in a random order.  The instructions to perform the tasks in a random order are intended to encourage subjects to actively choose the task to perform on every trial and to discourage subjects from selecting a strategy where they perform one task for a large number of trials and then switch to the other task or where they strictly alternate from one task to another.  This key difference between VTS and other task switching paradigms results in subjects having control over the task to be performed.  Removing some of the external support and placing control with the participant rather than the experimenter results in a more ecologically valid task switching environment than is found in other task switching paradigms.

 In recent research using the VTS paradigm, my lab has uncovered a number of factors that influence task choice. Stimulus availability biases task choice toward more available stimuli both through manipulations of stimulus onset asynchrony (Arrington, 2008) and perceptual processing characteristics (Arrington & Rhodes*, in press). Memory also influences task choice both through the contents of information currently maintained in working memory (Weaver & Arrington, in press) and instances of past performance stored in long-term memory (Arrington, Weaver, & Pauker*, under review). A variety of factors that limit top-down control disrupt task switching during VTS, including: short preparation intervals (Arrington & Logan, 2005), concurrent working memory load (Weaver & Arrington, in revision), and mind wandering (Arrington, Stuart*, & Weaver, in revision). The accumulating evidence suggests that a model of control mechanisms supporting voluntary task selection will need to account for a range of both bottom-up and top-down processes.

The importance of considering task choice in addition to task performance measures can be seen in studies showing dissociations between these two dependent variables.  Across several studies, task choice and RT switch cost measures have been uncorrelated (Arrington & Yates*, 2009; Butler, Arrington, & Weywadt, under review).  Furthermore, a recent study of individual differences showed that task choice and switch cost measures correlated with different attention networks as measured by the Attention Networks Test (Arrington & Yates*, 2009).  Current research investigating conflict-control models using VTS behavior shows that the model correctly predicts patterns of task performance, but fails to predict task choice behavior.  Given these intriguing dissociations, my ongoing research agenda focuses on the question: What can voluntary choice measures tell us about cognitive control that forced-choice performance measures cannot?



* Lehigh University Undergraduate

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Last updated 10/15/09