Influence of perturbations on behavior in a self-structurable paradigm to study executive functions
Creators: name: Senftleben, Ulrike
name: Herbers, Judith
name: Pannasch, Sebastian
name: Wehner, Peggy
name: Scherbaum, Stefan
name: Surrey, Caroline
Publisher: name: OSF Registries
Year: 2023
Subjects: subject: Applied Behavior Analysis
subject: Experimental Analysis of Behavior
subject: Cognition and Perception
subject: Social and Behavioral Sciences
subject: Psychology
subject: FOS: Psychology

description: People are required to handle a multitude of stimuli and tasks in their daily lives. Thereby, they are sometimes in externally structured situations and sometimes in self-structurable situations. In externally structured situations, humans are usually required to respond immediately to various stimuli and their processing sequences are predetermined. In self-structurable situations, they can and must freely choose the processing sequence and strategy of different stimuli and tasks. All these situations require the use of executive functions (e.g., Diamond, 2013; Miyake &amp; Friedman, 2012). However, the sub-capabilities of executive functions (such as coordinating the realization of multiple tasks and goals, maintaining a variety of information, shielding disruptive information) are required in different constellations, result in varying effects, e.g., switching costs or effects of processing sequences (Gao et al., 2009; Rogers &amp; Monsell, 1995), and pose different challenges to experimental control in laboratory studies (Arrington et al., 2014; Arrington &amp; Logan, 2004). In a previous study (osf.io/a83bg), we presented a novel self-structurable paradigm that enables the study of effects typical of externally and self-structurable situations that provides sufficient experimental control. This paradigm confronts participants with images of spring meadows with a variety of leaves, flowers and bugs. The participants’ task was to mark all bugs based on their characteristics with three different symbols (i.e., three tasks). Participants were instructed to complete all three tasks, but they were free to choose their task order and strategy. Our results showed typical effects occurring in externally structured paradigms (e.g., switch costs). We also identified different processing strategies and influences of self-selected processing sequences than can only be observed in self-structurable environments. Thus, we believe that our paradigm goes beyond standard experimental procedures, mirroring everyday task challenges to a stronger degree and thus shows great potential to enrich the examination of executive functions. 

Our previous study was a first attempt to capture novel insights into the complex multitasking behavior that occurs in everyday life. We now aim to extend this approach by combining the paradigm with additional disturbances and challenges to get even closer to the complexity of real life. In reality, we rarely find situations that are exclusively externally structured or exclusively self-structurable. For example, even in particularly self-structurable everyday work of a freelancer, disruptions often occur in the form of urgent emails, various deadline must be fulfilled and not all tasks can be processed immediately because information required may be missing. In order to reflect these realities more closely, we developed a new version of our previous paradigm where participants not only have to mark all bugs with different symbols based on their characteristics, but also have to complete small additional tasks. The additional tasks are not visible from the beginning. Instead, the availability of the individual additional tasks is signaled by acoustic signals and the appearance of bees, which appear at irregular intervals during the processing of an image. In our current study, we will examine the behavior of the participants in this new paradigm. Our first research question is: Which factors influence the processing approach of the additional tasks. Our second research question asks: In which way influence the additional tasks the processing of the main task.