Sequential effects in visual search, action control, and task switching: Evidence for distinct episodic-retrieval mechanisms.

Everyday tasks typically require us to flexibly change our goals, prioritize relevant objects, and select appropriate motor responses. The task-switching, visual-search, and action-control literatures that study these abilities have all documented striking sequential effects (i.e., a strong impact on behavior when various aspects of a task repeat from one trial to the next) and suggested different mechanisms to explain them. However, crosstalk between these literatures has typically been restricted to pairs, with little attempt to integrate all three. Therefore, how these effects interact in complex tasks remains largely unknown. We addressed this question in four experiments. Participants searched for a target among distractors. A precue indicated the task for the upcoming trial (i.e., which object to search for). The task, target location, and motor response either repeated or changed randomly. We found that when participants were highly incentivized to prepare for the upcoming task, the location of the target from previous trials (n-1 and n-2) influenced performance only when the task repeated from these trials. By contrast, location-response binding effects were largely unaffected by task preparation or by trials earlier than the previous one. These findings are consistent with two different episodic-retrieval mechanisms. A proactive and task-dependent episodic-retrieval mechanism accounts for the attentional bias toward previous target locations documented in the visual-search literature. An episodic-retrieval mechanism that is largely task-independent and operates later accounts for the binding-and-retrieval effects documented in the action-control literature. Our findings also provide novel evidence for task preparation and task inertia in task switching. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2026 APA, all rights reserved).