Transfer of Learned Cognitive Flexibility to Novel Stimuli and Task Sets

Abstract

Adaptive behavior requires learning about the structure of one’s environment to derive optimal action policies, and previous studies have documented transfer of such structural knowledge to bias choices in new environments. Here, we asked whether people could also acquire and transfer more abstract knowledge across different task environments, specifically expectations about cognitive control demands. Over three experiments, participants (Amazon Mechanical Turk workers; N = ~80 adults per group) performed a probabilistic card-sorting task in environments of either a low or high volatility of task rule changes (requiring low or high cognitive flexibility, respectively) before transitioning to a medium-volatility environment. Using reinforcement-learning modeling, we consistently found that previous exposure to high task rule volatilities led to faster adaptation to rule changes in the subsequent transfer phase. These transfers of expectations about cognitive flexibility demands were both task independent (Experiment 2) and stimulus independent (Experiment 3), thus demonstrating the formation and generalization of environmental structure knowledge to guide cognitive control.

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

“…In particular, Dreisbach and Fröber (2019) argue that some cases of flexibility modulations may depend on concurrent task activation, rather than the adjustment of a general “updating threshold.” Lowering the updating threshold may increase flexibility in general; on the other hand, adaptations based on concurrent task activation may manifest as increased flexibility between only specific tasks held in working memory. When participants can rely on explicit task cues for the upcoming task, they may rely on task-specific flexibility adaptations via such concurrent task-set activation rather than more effortful adjustments to the general updating threshold which may only be necessary in paradigms without explicit task cueing such as Wen et al (2023).…”

“…However, the current set of experiments only examined flexibility learning in the context of cued task switching and does not rule out the possibility that cross-task flexibility transfer could occur under other experimental conditions. Specifically, cross-task flexibility transfer was recently demonstrated in a probabilistic version of the Wisconsin Card Sorting Task (Wen et al, 2023). There, participants completed the card sorting task in either high (frequent uninstructed rule switches) or low volatility (infrequent rule switches) environments before transitioning to a medium-volatility transfer phase.…”

“…These learning rate adaptations occurred even when novel tasks and stimuli were used in the transfer phase. Wen et al’s (2023) paradigm may be particularly effective at inducing general changes in flexibility because participants had to voluntarily switch between categorization rules to discover rule switches based on feedback amidst uncertainty. Optimal performance may thus depend on changes in general exploratory behavior because of the lack of explicit task cueing.…”

Between-task transfer of item-specific control is replicable and extends to novel conditions.

“…However, in addition to there not being a clear theoretical explanation for why that might be the case, prior findings contradict this idea. Wen et al (2023) observed between-task transfer of cognitive flexibility in a probabilistic version of the Wisconsin Card Sorting Test. Participants were required to select a card that had the same value as the reference card in one of four dimensions (color, shape, number, and filling).…”

“…We tackled this question by investigating transfer of item-specific control from one task to another task-that is, we asked whether encountering a stimulus feature (i.e., a predictive cue) that became associated with a particular control setting in one task would similarly trigger retrieval and execution of that control setting in a different task. Only one prior experiment has demonstrated such between-task transfer of item-specific control (Ileri-Tayar et al, 2022; see Wen et al, 2023 for transfer of learned cognitive flexibility). Therefore, it is not yet known if the between-task transfer effect is (a) stable (i.e., whether it is replicable) and (b) generalizable (i.e., extends to novel, theoretically motivated conditions) or if there are potential boundary conditions for transfer.…”