Stimulus-cued completion of reconfiguration and retroactive adjustment as causes for the residual switching cost in multistep tasks

In two experiments, participants indicated the identity of a target stimulus along three of its dimensions (shape, fill, and size) in two possible orders that were randomly intermixed. In Experiment 1, the last dimension was identical in both responding orders (i.e., shape-fill- size , and fill-shape-size ). The results indicated that order switching produced a residual switching cost that was confined to the first response. In Experiment 2, the first dimension was identical in both responding orders ( size-fill-shape and size-shape-fill), and residual cost was found in both the first and the second response. The results support a revised retroactive-adjustment hypothesis, according to which the final tuning of subtask order control is performed during the execution of the subtask that most distinguishes the orders (the first subtask in Experiment 1 and the second subtask in Experiment 2).