Stephen Monsell

Who they are

Our sources identify Monsell through his publications and not through a biography, and this page keeps to that. He is a first author on the 1995 paper and a co-author on a run of later studies of preparation and the residual switch cost. The 2010 review by Kiesel and colleagues cites him repeatedly, and its opening page uses the citation count of his 2003 review as a sign of how large the field had grown, alongside a search that returned 2,513 hits in Medline and PsycINFO.

We do not state his institution or career dates here, because the sources read for this page do not give them in a form we could check.

Key papers

Rogers, R. D., & Monsell, S. (1995). Costs of a predictable switch between simple cognitive tasks. Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, 124(2), 207-231. In the experiments, participants judged a digit as odd or even or a letter as consonant or vowel, and the task changed on every second trial in five experiments and every fourth in a final one. Lengthening the response-stimulus interval up to 0.6 seconds reduced the cost of the predictable switch, and with 1.2 seconds of preparation a large reaction-time cost remained on the first trial of the new task. The authors attributed the remainder to a reconfiguration component triggered only by the task-relevant stimulus, and found that costs also rose when the stimulus included a character associated with the currently irrelevant task.

Monsell, S. (2003). Task switching. Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 7(3), 134-140. A review, cited 314 times by 2010 according to Kiesel and colleagues. We have not read it in full.

Monsell, S., & Azuma, R. (2000). A paper listing candidate sources of the residual cost, as our notes record it: a control process that can run only after the stimulus appears, occasional failure to prepare in advance, and two priming effects from earlier trials, one boosting the now-irrelevant task set and one inhibiting the now-relevant one.

Nieuwenhuis, S., & Monsell, S. (2002). Residual costs in task switching. This work tested whether the residual comes from preparation sometimes not being completed. Kiesel and colleagues report that strong incentives raised the proportion of fully prepared trials only marginally.

Monsell, S., & Sumner, P. (2003). Published in Memory and Cognition. Preparation reduced switch costs but not interference from irrelevant attributes, so interference control appears to be reactive.

Monsell, S., & Mizon, G. A. (2006). Reported in the 2010 review as observing large switch costs that declined with the cue-stimulus interval.

Monsell, S., & Lavric, A. (2014). Proposes that attentional inertia, a lingering pull toward the previously relevant location, contributes to the residual cost.

For the 2000, 2002, 2003 Memory and Cognition, 2006 and 2014 entries we have the descriptions given in the Kiesel review and in a list of his publications, not the papers themselves, and no volume or page numbers are given here.

Key ideas

The central idea in Monsell's work, as it reaches this site, is that a switch involves preparation that helps but does not complete. In the 1995 experiments more warning reduced the cost, and a cost still remained. His own later work asks why, and the answers on offer are the ones recorded on our residual switch cost page: a reconfiguration step that waits for the stimulus, interference from the task just left, a failure to prepare on some trials, and priming left over from earlier trials.

A second idea is that preparation does not act on everything equally. The 2003 study with Sumner found that preparing reduced switch costs but not the interference from irrelevant attributes of the stimulus, which the authors read as interference control being reactive.

A third is the limit on what motivation can do. When participants had strong incentives to prepare, the share of fully prepared trials rose only marginally in the study with Nieuwenhuis, which one summary of the work reads as an intrinsic limit on advance preparation.

For readers who meet task switching through popular books, the point of Monsell's papers is their size and their conditions. The costs in these experiments are fractions of a second on simple tasks, and they depend on how long people have to prepare and what the stimulus contains.

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