نبذة مختصرة : The central question underlying this doctoral dissertation project was whether the core idea of cognitive control being generic and modality-unspecific is convincing (or rather a tale), given that behavior is multimodal within a multisensory environment. Traditionally, models of cognitive control focused rather on central, amodal processes to explain interference while more or less neglecting modality-specific processes. However, overall five studies were conducted and provided converging evidence for modality-specific influences in task switching. Specifically, it was revealed that the modality compatibility effect found in Study I does not depend on DO (Study II). Moreover, Study III revealed an increased influence of modality compatibility on switch costs in tasks with tactile stimulation instead of visual stimulation. In contrast, replacing manual responses with oculomotor responses seems to shield against crosstalk (Study V). In Study IV tasks with bivalent stimuli were employed, which allowed to additionally assess congruency effects. Importantly, these congruency effects were increased in modality incompatible compared to modality compatible tasks, providing converging evidence for the suggested between-task crosstalk mechanism. In conclusion, substantial empirical evidence for modality-specific influences has been provided using the major paradigms, namely the dual-task paradigm and the task switching paradigm, assessing cognitive control processes. Consequently, the dominant idea of amodal, central processes in cognitive control needs to be revised by taking modality-specific influences into consideration, for example by implementing the idea of modality-specific ideomotor backward linkages. Developing the idea of between-task crosstalk based on ideomotor backward linkages provides an important contribution to current research of task switching and moreover of cognitive control processes in general.
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