The results of the previous follow-up experiment showed that when subjects completed an easier version of the change detection task with a longer pre-change exposure time, performance is comparable to that of 6AFC accuracy. Additionally, under these conditions subjects improve their hybrid task performance significantly compared to either task alone. What remains unclear from the previous experiment is whether this improvement is due to being familiar with both tasks in isolation prior to attempting the hybrid, or if the equated task difficulty sufficiently incentivized task-switching.
This follow-up experiment will resolve this ambiguity by changing the task order. This time participants will complete the unstudied change detection task, then the hybrid task (change detection with familiar objects), and finally the 6AFC memory task. If performance on the hybrid task falls back to the levels of the two individual tasks, we can conclude that the performance boost was due to task familiarity. If performance on the hybrid task remains the same--and higher than both individual tasks--we can conclude that the equated task difficulty drove the performance increase.