Fig. 1

Design of the cued task-switching paradigm. To counterbalance stimuli positions and response rules across participants, we created 4 versions of this task. Each participant was randomly assigned to one version (one example version was presented above). In each version, there were Winnie and Donald sessions. In each session, there were 80 trials, and each trial included the periods of Fixation, Cue, Interval, and Target. In proactive blocks, the border was green or red during the Cue period, whereas such colored border was not presented until the presence of targets in the reactive block. Participants were asked to make responses in Target periods by pressing the left or right key in each trial. Response rules were jointly determined by the cartoon character and colored border and differed between Winnie and Donald sessions. For example, in the Winnie session, the green border indicated that the rule was to judge whether the target was a food picture (i.e., green-food rule), and the red border was to judge whether the target was an animal picture (i.e., red-animal rule). Compared to the Winnie session, rules in the Donald session were reversed (i.e., red-food and green-animal). Such task rules were counterbalanced across participants