Stability and flexibility in cognitive control: Interindividual dynamics and task context processing

Abstract

Adaptive behaviour requires cognitive control for shielding current goals from distractors (stability) but at the same time for switching between alternative goals (flexibility). In this behavioural study, we examine the stability-flexibility balance in left- and right-handers during two types of decision-making, instructed (sensory cued) and voluntary (own choice), by means of distractor inhibition and hand/task switching. The data revealed that both groups showed opposite tendencies for instructed decision-making. Moreover, right-handers resisted distracting information more efficiently whereas left-handers showed superior switching abilities. When participants were involved in voluntary decision-making, no effects of handedness were noted, which suggests that free-choice processing alters the balance between stability and flexibility. These data illustrate that handedness is an index of individual variation during instructed decision-making, biasing the proficiency of cognitive control towards stability and flexibility of information processing. These biases can however be overruled by top-down strategies that dominate during voluntary decision-making. Overall, the research underlines the antagonistic functions of stability and flexibility in decision-making, and offers an approach for examining cognitive control and the role of internal and external factors in balancing the stability-flexibility trade-off.

No need to choose: Independent regulation of cognitive stability and flexibility challenges the stability-flexibility trade-off.

“…When the threshold is high, task switching is more difficult, but in turn, the current task set is well protected from interference. This reciprocity perspective has been a central tenet of the vast majority of literature on cognitive flexibility (Dreisbach & Fröber, 2019; Schlüter et al, 2019; Serrien & O’Regan, 2019; Siqi-Liu & Egner, 2020). However, despite its parsimony, the critical assumption of reciprocity and antagonism between stability and flexibility arguably remains unproven.…”

The Role of Effector-Specific Task Representations in Voluntary Task Switching

“…Regardless of which voluntary task-switching versions have been used, tasks were, in most cases, consistently mapped to different hands. However, a few studies have also mapped each task to homologous fingers (e.g., left index and right index finger = color task; left middle and right middle finger = letter task) ( Chen & Hsieh, 2013 ; Serrien & O’Regan, 2019 ). The methodological choice of preferring a task-to-hand mapping over other effector mappings (e.g., a task-to-finger mapping) is usually not discussed by researchers.…”

Attention and Interhemispheric Communication: Implications for Language Dominance

“…Accordingly, the scores of the items were added for each participant, and divided by the maximum score of the questionnaire, and multiplied by 100. This gave a handedness score that ranged from 0 (extreme left-handedness) to 100 (extreme right-handedness), (Serrien and O'Regan, 2019). The handedness scores were used to categorise the participants as 20 lefthanders (M AGE = 22.4 ± 0.8 years; M HAND = 22.2 ± 3.…”