Ashika Kamboj¹ (), Miriam Spering¹, Anthony Herdman¹, Skadi Gerkensmeier², Jessica Chalissery¹; ¹University of British Columbia, ²University of Luebeck

Controlling behavior in our complex, multisensory environment requires rapid switching between sensory inputs and tasks. The antisaccade task, a well-established paradigm for investigating response inhibition, can be adapted to study task switching by cueing participants to either perform a prosaccade or an antisaccade. Here we introduce a novel antisaccade paradigm that uses uni- and bimodal visual and auditory stimuli to elicit task switching in response to changing stimulus configurations rather than cued motor responses. Participants (n=22) completed an antisaccade task with either visual, auditory or combined visual-auditory trials with stimuli either spatially congruent (same side of fixation) or incongruent (opposite sides of fixation). In separate visual- and auditory-cued antisaccade blocks, stimulus configurations (unimodal, congruent, incongruent) were randomly interleaved. Trials were categorized as switch trials if the configuration changed from the previous trial and no-switch trials if it remained the same. A subset of participants (n=5) completed a blocked version of the task. Antisaccade latency did not differ between switch and no-switch trials, revealing no switch cost. A within-subject comparison (n=5) of the blocked and interleaved task latencies uncovered an alternation cost, with the average latency in the blocked task 36 ms shorter than that of switch trials in the interleaved task (p<.001). These costs were significantly larger in the auditory task compared to the visual task (p=.002). Our findings indicate that switching between sensory modalities within an antisaccade task may not engage task-switching mechanisms in the same way as classic task-switching protocols. However, the presence of an alternation cost suggests that switching between different trial types in the interleaved task increases cognitive demands, as participants are unable to rely on a consistent strategy.