Previous research has demonstrated that additional repetitions of an irrelevant contextual sound can modulate the after-effects associated with retrieving so-called stimulus–response bindings. In an auditory negative priming paradigm, having to respond to a stimulus that previously served as a distractor increases the likelihood of erroneously repeating the response executed on the preceding trial, a phenomenon referred to as the prime-response retrieval (prr) effect that can only be explained by assuming the retrieval of the distractor-response binding upon distractor repetition. Crucially, the prr effect is amplified when an incidental context (e.g., a sine tone) is also repeated. It remains unclear whether this modulation is restricted to concrete contextual stimuli, or whether it extends to more abstract, internalized forms of context.

The current series of experiments used task set as an abstract context within a negative priming paradigm. Task set was either repeated or switched between prime and probe presentations. In Experiment 1 (N = 61) and Experiment 2 (N = 69), task set was indicated by a written cue in each trial, while task was varied block-wise in Experiment 3 (N = 75). In Experiment 1 and 2, the results consistently revealed larger prr effects when the task set was repeated compared with when it changed, while only a tendency for this effect was observed in Experiment 3. These findings suggest that task sets can function as contextual cues, although the results from Experiment 3 also suggest that the physical presentation of the task cue contributes to the observed effect.