Unfortunately the authors did not report performance measures on the tasks, so the modulations of oscillatory

activity cannot be interpreted accordingly. Nonetheless, there is striking similarity between the physiological effects they report and those of the current study. The modulation of alpha-band activity over parieto-occipital scalp as a function of task switches vs. repeats has also been addressed in studies in which both tasks were performed on visual stimuli (i.e. within-modality). In one such study, for example, participants were free to choose which of a pair of tasks to perform on a set of geometric shapes (either a location or a color task; Poljac & Yeung, 2014). Performance measures made it clear that the location task Galunisertib proved easier in that participants were both faster and more accurate on this task. What these authors found was that alpha desynchronisations were equivalent preceding switches to both tasks, whereas there was a distinct increase in synchronisation preceding repeats of the easier location task, an effect not seen for repeats of the more challenging color task. Similar to the differences seen here for switch vs. repeat visual trials, these data suggest

that equally vigorous desynchronisations were employed to switch to each visual task, regardless of difficulty, but that once a switch had been made and the participants were ‘locked onto’ the task at hand, resources could be withdrawn from the Selleckchem GDC0068 easier location task. More vigorous alpha desynchronisations over

parieto-occipital scalp preceding switch vs. repeat trials in purely within-modality visual task-switching designs have now been reported by a number of groups (Sauseng et al., 2006). This issue of differential oscillatory suppression as a function of task difficulty was also recently addressed in a study in non-human primates (Buschman et al., 2012). Recording from prefrontal cortex, P-type ATPase monkeys were required to switch between performing a color discrimination task and a line orientation discrimination task. Saccadic RTs were significantly slowed by a switch away from the orientation task to the color task, but not vice versa. This pattern led Buschman and colleagues to consider the orientation task as ‘dominant’ over the color task. Performing the ‘non-dominant’ color task was accompanied by an increase in alpha coherence in neuronal populations showing selectivity for the orientation task, whereas performance of the dominant orientation task did not result in increased alpha coherence in neurons selective for the color task.