Toward an integrative understanding of the flexibility-stability-balance and its underlying mechanisms via computational modeling and behavioral experimentation

• Applicants: Professorin Dr. Gesine Dreisbach; Professor Dr. Sebastian Musslick
• Subject Area: General, Cognitive and Mathematical Psychology
• Term: since 2025
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 556955840

The ability to balance cognitive flexibility and stability is crucial for human adaptive behavior in constantly changing environments. However, there is a lack of consensus on the mechanisms that underlie both faculties. This lack of integration is a significant obstacle to comprehending the regulation of cognitive flexibility and stability in human cognition, such as understanding whether flexibility and stability are regulated independently or whether they need to be traded off against each other via shared mechanisms. Thus, a more mechanistic understanding is needed to advance our current understanding of cognitive flexibility and stability, and, ultimately, to devising effective interventions to enhance both faculties. With this grant proposal, we seek to obtain a more integrative understanding of the mechanisms underlying the regulation of cognitive flexibility and stability. Specifically, we seek to address recent conflicting results that (a) suggest that cognitive flexibility and stability trade off against each other versus (b) that they are regulated independently. The theoretical account probed in this work is capable of reconcealing these two differing perspectives, suggesting that cognitive flexibility and stability can be both dependent and independent: Cognitive flexibility and stability trade off within a level of information processing (e.g., the processing of task sets) but can be regulated independently across levels of information processing (e.g., the processing of task sets versus the processing of response sets). To achieve these goals, we will conduct a series of computational and behavioral experiments using a novel task switching paradigm that exposes mechanisms of stability and flexibility at the task-level versus the response level. This is achieved by introducing distractors that are either associated with the same task (within-task interference) or the competing task (between-task interference) as the target stimulus. The former exposes mechanisms that regulate cognitive stability at the level of stimuli/responses (versus tasks), whereas the latter allows for both. Preliminary results from pilot data suggests that this paradigm is capable of differentiating different computational mechanisms underlying a dependent and independent regulation of cognitive flexibility. Here, we seek to better understand which contextual factors (e.g., task switch rate, proportion response congruency) tab into these different forms of regulation, by comparing the explanatory power of the different computational mechanisms across a series of behavioral experiments involving the different experimental manipulations. We hope that such an integrative and multimethodological effort will enable theoretical commensurability across a plethora of experimental findings and, ultimately, advance research in this field.

• DFG Programme: Research Grants