Joshua S. Rubinstein

Who they are

Rubinstein is credited as first author, a point confirmed against the OpenAlex record with the sequence marked first. His affiliation as printed on the paper is the Federal Aviation Administration, William J. Hughes Technical Center, and not a university psychology department. David Meyer and Jeffrey Evans were at the University of Michigan. We do not give a biography beyond that, because the sources read for this page contain none.

The distinction matters for credit. This site names the first author of a paper, and the first author here is Rubinstein.

Key papers

Rubinstein, J. S., Meyer, D. E., & Evans, J. E. (2001). Executive control of cognitive processes in task switching. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception and Performance, 27(4), 763-797. doi:10.1037/0096-1523.27.4.763.

The design, as recorded in our notes, was a successive-tasks paradigm in which participants worked through decks of stimulus cards, either repeating one task down a block or alternating between two. The switching cost was the difference between mean reaction time on alternating and on repetitive blocks. Experiments 1 and 4 classified geometric objects by perceptual rules, and Experiments 2 and 3 solved two-digit arithmetic problems, with complexity manipulated as addition and subtraction against multiplication and division.

According to the American Psychological Association's press release of 5 August 2001, the four experiments used 12, 36, 36 and 24 young adults, which is 108 in all, from one university.

Key ideas

The paper's abstract says that task alternation yielded switching-time costs that increased with rule complexity and decreased with task cuing. The authors read the additivity of those effects as support for a model with separate goal-shifting and rule-activation stages.

The reported costs, in milliseconds as printed: Experiment 1, 975 (SE 71); Experiment 2, 653 (SE 140); Experiment 3, 614 (SE 237). One direction of switching was close to free, since the time taken for switching from subtraction to addition problems was again very short, a mean of 29. The complexity effect in Experiment 3 was a mean difference of 960 (SE 355).

Scale is part of the finding. In Experiment 2, multiplication and division took 3,597 milliseconds longer than addition and subtraction on repetitive blocks, so the switch cost is a few hundred milliseconds sitting on top of trials lasting seconds. The paper's own review of earlier work notes mean switching costs of about 180 and 135 milliseconds after response-stimulus intervals of 20 and 1,100 milliseconds.

The abstract adds that rule activation appeared to take longer when switching from a familiar task to an unfamiliar one than in the reverse direction, and the press release estimates that rule activation alone takes several tenths of a second. Those statements describe the model's stages, goal shifting and rule activation, and the experiments were designed to separate them by manipulating complexity and cues.

A familiarity effect is reported differently in different places. The press release says costs were higher when subjects moved to unfamiliar tasks. In the part of the paper we read, the overall familiarity asymmetry was not reliable, with a mean difference of 261 milliseconds and a standard error of 298. We did not read Experiment 4 or the General Discussion, so the two accounts may be reconciled there.

What the paper does not contain, in the four fifths we read, is any statement about productive time, workplace performance or a percentage of the working day. Figures of that kind attached to this research come from elsewhere, and our article on The Borrowed Premise traces one of them.

---