Learning where to be flexible: Using environmental cues to regulate cognitive control

Xu, Shengjie; Simoens, Jonas; Verguts, Tom; Braem, Senne

doi:10.31234/osf.io/y5h78

Cited by 4 publications

(3 citation statements)

References 48 publications

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“…However, the authors' findings may not be directly comparable to the current results since Ileri-Tayar et al (2022) were interested in persisting conflict adaptation to mostly congruent or mostly incongruent stimuli or stimulus features in neutral transfer lists, while the current study probed flexibility adaptations to list-wide context. Additionally, also investigating contextual adaptations of flexibility, a recent study found that participants adapted to task-irrelevant environmental cues that signal varying demands for switching, although the authors did not test for cross-task transfer (Xu et al, 2022).…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Task sets define boundaries of learned cognitive flexibility in list-wide proportion switch manipulations.

Siqi-Liu¹,

Egner²

2023

Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception and Perfor

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Different contexts in daily life often require varying levels of cognitive flexibility. Previous research has shown that people adapt their level of flexibility to match changing contextual demands for task switching in cued-switching paradigms that vary the proportion of switch trials within lists of trials. Specifically, the behavioral costs of switching as opposed to repeating tasks scale inversely with the proportion of switchesa finding referred to as the list-wide proportion switch (LWPS) effect. Previous research found that flexibility adaptations transferred across stimuli, but were specifically tied to task sets, rather than block-wide changes in flexibility state. In the current study, we conducted additional tests of the hypothesis that flexibility learning is task specific in the LWPS paradigm. In Experiments 1 and 2, we used trial-unique stimuli and unbiased task cues to control for associative learning tied to stimulus or cue features. Experiment 3 further tested whether task-specific learning occurred even for tasks performed on integrated features of the same stimuli. Across these three experiments, we found robust task-specific flexibility learning, which transferred across novel stimuli and unbiased cues and occurred regardless of stimulus-feature overlap between tasks. Public Significance StatementDifferent situations in daily life require different levels of cognitive flexibility. For example, a barista at a busy café must rapidly switch between multiple tasks such as taking orders, steaming milk, and pulling shots from the espresso machine, whereas a student studying in a busy café needs to avoid switching attention to the many distractions in his environment to focus on his task. Previous work has suggested that people can match their flexibility (or switch readiness) to different settings. However, such flexibility learning is "task specific," such that people only learn to become better at switching to tasks that they have more practice switching to, rather than being more flexible at switching to any task. To further test this hypothesis, in the present study, we investigated conditions where task-specific flexibility learning might not occur. Nonetheless, we repeatedly found that people learned to become more flexible only for the tasks that they practiced switching to more often. These findings are important for understanding the conditions where flexibility learning can or cannot transfer to new situations.

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Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Task sets define boundaries of learned cognitive flexibility in list-wide proportion switch manipulations.

Siqi-Liu¹,

Egner²

2023

Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception and Perfor

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“…The number of learning trials ranged from 192 to 320. This may simply not be enough time to form a sufficiently strong cue–transition association (see Xu et al, 2023). Notably, with the current procedure, learning can continue into the first part of the test phase where the cues are still predicting the upcoming transition in forced-choice trials.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Flexibility by association? No evidence for an influence of cue–transition associations on voluntary task switching.

Mendl,

Fröber,

Dreisbach

2024

Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception and Perfor

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“…However, sometimes it is more beneficial to focus on a single task, and we should apply a less flexible, but more stable cognitive strategy, e.g., to better shield from interfering information. This regulation of the trade-off between cognitive flexibility and cognitive stability is important, as both control modes guide adaptive behaviour depending on the context (Braem & Egner, 2018;Brosowsky & Egner, 2021;Cohen et al, 2007;Diamond, 2013;Egner, 2023;Goschke & Bolte, 2014;Xu et al, 2023). In this study, we aimed to test if people learn to be more flexible (stable) when cognitive flexibility (stability) is selectively reinforced.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

The effects of reinforcing task alternations on voluntary task selection

Held,

Vermeylen,

Krebs

et al. 2023

Preprint

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Everyday life often requires us to switch between states of cognitive flexibility and stability. However, little is yet known about what drives their regulation at the meta-control level. Based on current theories on cognitive control, we tested whether the regulation of cognitive flexibility and stability is guided by reinforcement learning. Using a task switching paradigm with double registration procedure – where people need to choose which task to perform before seeing the target, we systematically reinforced cued task switches or repetitions to test whether this led to more voluntary task switching (flexibility) or repeating (stability) on interspersed unrewarded free choice trials, respectively. While we did not find the hypothesized effect in an uninstructed version of the experiment (n=97), informing participants (n=58) on the reinforcement schedule on cued trials induced more switching or repeating on unrewarded free choice trials. We speculate that people adapt their control strategies if they are aware of the respective benefits, even when they cease to be rewarded. Interestingly, choices were predominantly driven by task preference in both experiments and strongly correlated with task performance costs. This finding suggests that, when using an interspersed design with double registration procedure, people mostly choose tasks based on task difficulty rather than switch avoidance. Together, these experiments help determine whether and when people can learn about the value of task selection strategies beyond the scope of a single task, and provide a self-regulating system to understand putative higher-order control processes.

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Learning where to be flexible: Using environmental cues to regulate cognitive control

Cited by 4 publications

References 48 publications

Task sets define boundaries of learned cognitive flexibility in list-wide proportion switch manipulations.

Task sets define boundaries of learned cognitive flexibility in list-wide proportion switch manipulations.

Flexibility by association? No evidence for an influence of cue–transition associations on voluntary task switching.

The effects of reinforcing task alternations on voluntary task selection

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