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Comment by darthrupert | Hacker News Reader

Fascinating that you're measuring milliseconds where I'm having context switches that cost me minutes to hours to days.

I don't think this game is all that representative of context-switching overhead, as my 4th attempt gives evidence that this improves quickly with practice:

    RT in pure trials: 422ms
    RT in mixed trials: 611ms
    Mixing cost: 189ms
    RT in task-repeat trials (in mixed blocks): 611ms
    RT in task-switching trials (in mixed blocks): 602ms
    Task-switch cost: -9ms

The "mixed trials" are naturally slower because I'm having to recognise 4 patterns instead of 2, but only by ~50%.

Whoa, a negative task-switch cost! I didn't take it multiple times, but it makes sense that having practice at this specific task probably improves both your overall response times and maybe more specifically improves the different trials.

What I'm curious about is whether we also get specifically good at say, task-switching between a code editor and say, Stack Overflow, over time

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