Bypassing the central bottleneck with easy tasks: Beyond ideomotor compatibility

Maquestiaux, Lyphout-Spitz, Ruthruff, and Arexis (2020) demonstrated that ideomotor-compatible (IM) tasks (e.g., pressing the left key when an arrow points left) can operate automatically, entirely bypassing the central bottleneck that constrains dual-task performance. But is bottleneck bypassing a specific consequence of IM compatibility or is it due to task ease? To answer this question, we tested the automaticity of a task that was easy but not IM. The task was easy due to the high semantic compatibility between the stimulus and the response: saying “ping” when hearing “pong” and “pong” to “ping” in Experiment 1, saying “low” when hearing “high” and “high” to “low” in Experiment 2. We presented it as Task 2, along with a Task 1 that was not easy, due to the use of an arbitrary stimulus-response mapping. Single-task trials were randomly intermixed with dual-task trials and then used as baselines to assess dual-task costs and to simulate distributions of inter-response intervals (IRIs) predictive of bottleneck bypassing vs. bottlenecking. The results of both experiments provided converging evidence that the entire Task 2 bypassed the bottleneck on virtually all trials: very small dual-task costs, high percentages of response reversals, and a close match between the observed IRI distributions and that predicted by bottleneck bypassing. Neither ideomotor compatibility nor task speed (the semantic task was not particularly fast) explain these findings. We therefore propose that the key to bypassing the central bottleneck is the ease with which people can fully load the stimulus-response mapping into working memory.