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Switching tasks always costs you
The cost of switching
As soon as a person switches into a new task, a cost carries over from the previous one: responses get slower and harder for a couple of trials. The cost is well known. Theories for why include some residue, a kind of inertia carried over from the previous task, and the reconfiguration the brain needs between where it was and where it is going.
Studying the switch
Whatever the cause, switching takes effort, and it is a skill. Researchers are studying it in brain recordings from humans, including single-unit recordings from epilepsy patients as they switch between tasks, and AI designers are working on how to switch quickly and anticipate when to switch.
Training the switch
Meditative exercises are thought to train exactly that: the switch from being constantly bombarded by the world to putting all of it aside and being inside. Richie Davidson's work on short, regular meditation reports demonstrable health benefits in well-controlled studies. Variability and switching are trainable skills that help basic physiology, emotion granularity, emotion regulation, and control of thought.
What causes the task-switching cost?
Researchers have long split the explanations into two. One, from Alan Allport and colleagues in 1994, holds that the previous task's mental setup lingers and interferes with the new one, which is called task-set inertia. The other holds that the brain must actively reconfigure itself for the new task, a process studied by Stephen Monsell. His 2003 review in Trends in Cognitive Sciences concluded that both likely contribute.
How were switch costs first measured?
Psychologist Arthur Jersild published the earliest known study in 1927. He gave students lists of numbers to work through, with one task per list or with the tasks alternating down the list. Alternating took noticeably longer than doing each task on its own. Today the same logic is used with computers that time responses in milliseconds.
Why do epilepsy patients give such precise brain data?
When seizures cannot be controlled with medication, surgeons sometimes implant electrodes inside the brain for days or weeks to find where the seizures begin. During that period, patients can volunteer for cognitive tasks. The electrodes can record single neurons in a living human brain, which is almost never otherwise possible. Findings from these recordings include neurons that respond to specific people or concepts.
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