6. Task family assignment¶
6.1 What a family is¶
A paradigm family groups tasks by what the participant does: conflict and interference tasks, response inhibition tasks, recall and recognition tests, and so on. That is the same principle the inclusion test uses to decide whether two experiments are the same task (section 3): procedure first. Which cognitive processes a task engages is the other axis, carried by the task-process links, so the two views cross-link rather than duplicate one another.
A family is a browsing aid. It is not a claim about mechanism, and a task’s family says
nothing about which processes it engages. The families, with a scope statement for each,
are listed on the Tasks by paradigm family page
and defined in data/task_family_defs.tsv.
6.2 Primary and secondary membership¶
Families are organizational, not a hierarchy. A task may belong to more than one, so membership is recorded as a list of edges, in the same spirit as the task-process links:
Every task has exactly one primary family. That is where the task is filed: its family page holds its full entry, and the sidebar and listings place it there. The primary is a filing choice, made because a page has to live somewhere; it is not a statement that the family is the task’s “type”.
A task may also be a secondary member of other families. A secondary membership is a cross-listing: the task appears under “Also filed here” on that family page, and the task page names the family after its primary. It carries a rationale saying why the task belongs there too.
The Navon Task, for example, is filed under conflict and interference tasks because its procedure pits a global feature against a local one, and is cross-listed under perceptual judgment and psychophysics tasks because the global-local judgment is also a perceptual one. Both statements are true; the filing picks one as the home.
The membership is the families list on the task record in data/task_details.json.
Each entry names the family, its role (primary or secondary), a confidence mark
(section 6.3) and, for a secondary or a review entry, the rationale. A pseudo task
(section 1.3) belongs to the pseudo
task family only.
6.3 The review mark¶
Each membership carries a confidence of high or review. A review mark means the
assignment is a judgement call the curator has flagged for a second opinion. On the
primary it means “not sure this is the right home”; on a secondary it means “not sure
this belongs here at all”. In both cases the rationale names the alternative or the
doubt, and the task is listed under “Marked for review” on the family page for a reviewer
to settle. The Tasks page reports how many memberships carry the mark.
6.4 Proposing a change¶
To move a task to another family, cross-list it under one, or remove a cross-listing, open an issue at https://github.com/hed-standard/hed-task/issues naming the task, the family, and the procedural reason. A move argues that the participant’s activity is better described by the other family’s scope; a cross-listing argues that both scopes apply. The same rules, with categories in place of families, govern how processes are assigned to categories (process criteria, section 4).