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In our lives, we often switch between different tasks. The literature has repeatedly shown that task switching comes with a performance cost, and it is evaluated more negatively compared to task repetition (Vermeylen et al., 2019). Task switching is indeed more effortful than task repetition, and people generally are effort-aversive (Kool et al., 2010). However, other research showed that effortful tasks can also lead to affective gain when done correctly (Schouppe et al., 2014), and some people can deliberately choose more effortful task options (Inzlicht et al., 2022). For example, Schouppe and colleagues investigated affective priming in a Stroop task, and found that correctly solving incongruent trials led to relatively more positive affect compared to solving congruent trials. We suggest that the contradictory results of Vermeylen et al., vs Schouppe et al., could be due to a methodological difference: the first measured affective evaluation after the whole task (i.e., after having experienced the higher error rate of task switching trials, furthermore enhanced by trial-by-trial feedback), whereas the latter measured it after each trial. We surmise that by measuring affective evaluation after each task switch vs. task repetition, we could observe increased positive affect after successful switching compared to successful repetition (in line with Schouppe et al.). |
