Human Adaptation to Demand for Cognitive Flexibility in a Three-Task Environment

Abstract

Cognitive control is our ability to guide attention, thought and action in accord with goals or intentions. However, controlled behavior is subject to a fundamental dilemma between cognitive stability and flexibility. Cognitive stability is the mental ability to focus entirely on one task and is studied through distraction inhibition. Cognitive flexibility is the mental ability to switch one's thinking and attention between different tasks or operations and is studied through cue-based task-switching. The stability-flexibility dilemma states that a tradeoff exists between these two cognitive abilities. Previous work has shown that constraints on the amount of control allocated to a task can help to optimize the stability-flexibility dilemma and that these constraints increase as a function of flexibility. However, it is unclear as to whether these constraints are imposed globally (across all tasks) or locally. Our goal is to investigate local versus global context effects through the cognitive stability and flexibility dilemma in a three-task environment. I hypothesized that if there is a global constraint, people should be allocating low attention to all three tasks and if there is a local constraint, each task would have its own intrinsic bias. I tested our hypothesis by conducting a human behavioral cue-based task switching study in which I manipulated switch frequencies in three tasks to determine if our hypothesis was significantly true. Using both linear model selection and linear mixed model selection, I found that task transition, switch probability and the interaction between these two independent variables had a significant effect on reaction times while task transition, congruency and the interaction between these two independent variables had a significant effect on error rate. This suggests that constraints on control are local (task-specific) as opposed to just global.