ANTHROPOLOGIST AND GOVERNMENT EMPLOYEE: A DESCRIPTION OF CAREER PATHS TO BECOMING AN APPLIED ANTHROPOLOGIST WITH THE U.S. DEPARTMENT OF VETERAN AFFAIRS.

Humans can flexibly adapt their behaviour to produce certain desired consequences in their environment. For this, they must be able to focus on a certain task and execute it with an appropriate response. Also, they must prevent interference from irrelevant or distracting tasks and environmental stimuli. In addition, to act based on their goals, humans often need to select a task to perform among alternative ones (e.g., should I keep reading this article, or should I write up that discussion section?). The present study examines whether task choice can be influenced by transient associations formed between a task set and a task-irrelevant contextual stimulus. This helps refine our understanding of how goal-directed behaviour is implemented, and the contribution of bottom-up and top-down processes therein. Multitasking is considered an ideal setting to pinpoint the cognitive control processes underlying goal-directed behaviour, both because managing different tasks at the same time requires control and because it mimics the intrinsically complex human-environment interactions (; ). Different multitasking paradigms were developed to this aim, such as the task-switching paradigm (; for reviews, see ; ; ). Here, participants are instructed about two or more tasks and then perform a task in each trial, either based on a pre-established sequence or a task cue. This paradigm is therefore a task switching. A robust finding is task-repetition benefits, that is, better performance when the task repeats from the previous trial, compared to when it switches. Task-repetition benefits are often referred to as task-switch costs, but the two labels indicate the same measure. Repetition benefits have been attributed to task set reconfiguration processes being necessary in task switches but not in task repetitions (). However, different theoretical accounts pointed at bottom-up processes being responsible for repetition benefits (), such as the carryover of a task representation to the next trial, due to inertia (; ). The voluntary task switching (VTS) paradigm was then developed to obtain a purer measure—compared to forced-choice task switching—of the top-down processes underlying task switching (; ). The reasoning is that stimulus-driven bottom-up influences were minimised in VTS, compared to forced-choice task switching, where the task choice is dictated by an external stimulus that requires additional processes such as cue encoding and might trigger cue repetition priming () and influence performance via task-cue associations (). In VTS, instead, participants are instructed about two tasks and, in each trial, they decide which task to perform and execute it. Typically, when no instructions about switching behaviour are provided, participants tend to show high repetition rates (80%–90%, ). Since this prevents having enough switch trials to measure task-repetition benefits, often participants are given some randomness instructions, such as choosing the task as if they were flipping a coin in each trial and performing both tasks equally often (). With these instructions, participants usually perform each task equally often, but they choose substantially more task repetitions than switches. Independent of the instructions, participants show task-repetition benefits in VTS as well. This was initially taken as evidence that repetition benefits are apt to measure pure top-down control processes since they occur in a VTS setting where bottom-up influences are minimised.