Mechanisms underlying flexible task choice: Understanding context and reward effects

• Applicant: Professorin Dr. Gesine Dreisbach
• Subject Area: General, Cognitive and Mathematical Psychology
• Term: from 2019 to 2023
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 423229271

• Final Report Year: 2023

Final Report Abstract

Two major questions were addressed in this research project. For one, we aimed to gather a deeper understanding of how context features and individual factors would modulate the decision to switch in a voluntary task switching paradigm. We could show that the switch frequency effect in terms of higher voluntary switch rates (VSR) in the context of frequent forced task switching is rather short-lived and does not generalize to new tasks. Moreover, we investigated widely discussed bottom-up influences on the VSR and found that neither irrelevant feature switches nor color cues that were consistently associated with either task switches or task repetitions have an influence on the VSR. Instead, we found that objective performance costs and to a lesser degree subjective effort and performance costs can predict the VSR. Second, we aimed to elucidate the mechanisms underlying the reward sequence effect (i.e., the finding that sequential changes in reward prospect have a reliable effect on switch costs and on the voluntary switch rate). We gathered indirect evidence that an increase in reward from one trial to the next increases flexibility on a global (task unspecific) level. In two further studies, using pupillometry and event-related potentials the mechanisms underlying the sequential reward effect were investigated further. Both physiological measures were sensitive to not only the current reward magnitude but also the reward sequence, demonstrating dynamic changes in motivational arousal and preparatory effort. The highest arousal and effort was found when reward prospect increased. Taken together, findings from this research project brought up converging evidence that different mechanisms underly the switch frequency effect on the one side and the sequential reward effect on the other. On a more general level, this shows that many roads lead to cognitive flexibility.

Publications

• Bottom-up influences on voluntary task switching in different reward contexts. Poster presented at the Annual Meeting of the Psychonomic Society, Montréal, Canada, November 2019.
  Jurczyk, V., Fröber, K. & Dreisbach, G.
  
• Does the Subjective Value of Cognitive Effort Modulate Voluntary Task Choice? Poster presented at the Annual Meeting of the Psychonomic Society, Montréal, Canada, November 2019.
  Dreisbach, G. & Jurczyk, V.
  
• Carrot or Stick: Cognitive Flexibility Increases with Increasing Loss or Reward Prospect. Poster at the 61st Annual Meeting of the Psychonomic Society, virtual meeting, November 20th 2020.
  Fröber, K. & Dreisbach, G.
  
• How sequential changes in reward expectation modulate cognitive control: Pupillometry as a tool to monitor dynamic changes in reward expectation. International Journal of Psychophysiology, 148, 35-49.
  Fröber, Kerstin; Pittino, Ferdinand & Dreisbach, Gesine
  
• How Sequentially Changing Reward Prospect Modulates Meta-control: Increasing Reward Prospect Promotes Cognitive Flexibility. Cognitive, Affective, & Behavioral Neuroscience, 21(3), 534-548.
  Fröber, Kerstin & Dreisbach, Gesine
  
• Bottom-up influences on voluntary task switching in different reward contexts?. Acta Psychologica, 217, 103312.
  Jurczyk, V.; Fröber, K. & Dreisbach, G.
  
• Investigating anticipatory processes during sequentially changing reward prospect: An ERP study. 5. Symposium talk at the International conference of the European Society for Cognitive and Affective Neuoscience (ESCAN), Budapest (virtual meeting), June 26th 2021.
  Fröber, K., Mendl, J., Jurczyk, V. & Dreisbach, G.
  
• Investigating anticipatory processes during sequentially changing reward prospect: An ERP study. Brain and Cognition, 155, 105815.
  Fröber, Kerstin; Jurczyk, Vanessa; Mendl, Jonathan & Dreisbach, Gesine
  
• On the interplay of introspective switch costs, objective switch costs, and the voluntary switch rate. Talk at the 10th Doktorand:innen-Workshop Allgemeine Psychologie (A-Dok), Würzburg, Germany, 16.07.2021.
  Mendl, J. & Dreisbach, G.
  
• The role of objective and subjective effort costs in voluntary task choice. Psychological Research, 86(5), 1366-1381.
  Dreisbach, Gesine & Jurczyk, Vanessa
  
• You can’t always get what you want: When persistence in task choice requires increased flexibility. Talk at the 63rd Tagung experimentell arbeitender Psychologen (TeaP), Ulm (virtual meeting), March 15th 2021.
  Fröber, K. & Dreisbach, G.
  
• Keep flexible—Keep switching? Boundary conditions of the influence of forced task switching on voluntary task switching.. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition, 48(9), 1249-1262.
  Fröber, Kerstin; Jurczyk, Vanessa & Dreisbach, Gesine
  
• Reasons to switch: How reward, context and ability modulate cognitive flexibility. Invited talk (online) at the Kick-off event for “Women in Control”, June 15 th 2022.
  Dreisbach, G.
  
• Reasons to switch: How reward, context and ability modulate cognitive flexibility. Invited talk at the International Symposium “Volition and Cognitive Control: From Executive Functions to Meta-Control” at the Dresden University of Technology, July 12th to 14th, 2022
  Dreisbach, G.
  
• The role of objective and introspective switch costs in voluntary task choice. Talk at the 64th Tagung experimentell arbeitender Psychologen (TeaP), Köln (virtual meeting), 23.03.2022.
  Mendl, J. & Dreisbach, G.
  
• The role of objective and introspective switch costs in voluntary task choice.. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception and Performance, 48(12), 1373-1389.
  Mendl, Jonathan & Dreisbach, Gesine
  
• The subjective effort of switching tasks in voluntary task switching. Poster at the 22nd conference of the European Society for Cognitive Psychology (ESCOP), Lille, France, 30.08.2022.
  Mendl, J. & Dreisbach, G.
  
• To switch or to repeat? Commonalities and differences in the electrophysiological correlates of preparation for voluntary and forced task choices. Psychophysiology, 59(9).
  Jurczyk, Vanessa; Steinhauser, Robert; Dreisbach, Gesine & Steinhauser, Marco
  
• Why (some) people go for the difficult task: The role of objective and subjective effort costs in voluntary task choice. Symposium talk at the 22nd conference of the European Society for Cognitive Psychology (ESCOP), Lille, France, Sept. 1st 2022.
  Dreisbach, G. & Jurczyk, V.
  
• You can('t) always get what you want: When goal persistence requires flexibility. Symposium talk at the 22nd Conference of the European Society for Cognitive Psychology (ESCoP), Lille, France, Sept. 1st 2022.
  Fröber, K. & Dreisbach, G.
  
• You can('t) always get what you want: When goal persistence requires flexibility. Symposium talk at the 64th Tagung experimentell arbeitender Psychologen (TeaP), Köln (virtual meeting), March 23 rd 2022.
  Fröber, K. & Dreisbach, G.