5. Limitations
While our study is the initial endeavor to directly investigate diverse cross-task adaptation patterns across three switching contexts, acknowledging certain limitations is crucial for future research. Firstly, participants in the present study were all late-proficient Chinese-English bilinguals whose reported L2 acquisition occurred after the age of 6. Previous studies have found that the early bilingual experiences yield stronger functional connectivity of brain regions between language and cognitive context, and that this pattern was associated with higher brain activation efficiency (Berken et al., 2016; Stein et al., 2014), suggesting that L2 age of acquisition may affect the efficiency of cross-task adaptation. Secondly, our experiment was conducted on single-person situations without simulating virtual companions. However, a recent study by Rafeekh and Mishr (2021) reported that if a session, in which bilinguals are introduced to a partner with a differing L2 proficiency level, is added before beginning the experiment, bilinguals show a lower conflict effect in the flanker task than in the presence of a balanced bilingual partner, even the partner only appears on screen and is not required to complete the task with the participant. These results suggest that the dynamic regulation of the context mechanism in bilinguals may be influenced by interactions with interlocutors. Future studies should explore the effect of interpersonal interactions on cross-task adaptation in interactive contexts.