Dynamic changes in task preparation in a multi-task environment: The task transformation paradigm.

A key element of human flexible behavior concerns the ability to continuously predict and prepare for sudden changes in tasks or actions. Here, we tested whether people can dynamically modulate task preparation processes and decision-making strategies when the identity of a to-be-performed task becomes uncertain. To this end, we developed a new paradigm where participants need to prepare for one of nine tasks on each trial. Crucially, in some blocks, the task being prepared could suddenly shift to a different task after a longer cue-target interval, by changing either the stimulus category or categorization rule that defined the initial task. We found that participants were able to dynamically modulate task preparation in the face of this task uncertainty. A second experiment shows that these changes in behavior were not simply a function of decreasing task expectancy, but rather of increasing switch expectancy. Finally, in the third and fourth experiment, we demonstrate that these dynamic modulations can be applied in a compositional manner, depending on whether either only the stimulus category or categorization rule would be expected to change.

Learning environment-specific learning rates.

People often have to switch back and forth between different environments that come with different problems and volatilities. While volatile environments require fast learning (i.e., high learning rates), stable environments call for lower learning rates. Previous studies have shown that people adapt their learning rates, but it remains unclear whether they can also learn about environment-specific learning rates, and instantaneously retrieve them when revisiting environments. Here, using optimality simulations and hierarchical Bayesian analyses across three experiments, we show that people can learn to use different learning rates when switching back and forth between two different environments. We even observe a signature of these environment-specific learning rates when the volatility of both environments is suddenly the same. We conclude that humans can flexibly adapt and learn to associate different learning rates to different environments, offering important insights for developing theories of meta-learning and context-specific control.

Associative Visuomotor Learning Using Transcranial Magnetic Stimulation Induces Stimulus-Response Interference.

Classical conditioning states that the systematic co-occurrence of a neutral stimulus with an unconditioned stimulus can cause the neutral stimulus to, over time, evoke the same response as the unconditioned stimulus. On a neural level, Hebbian learning suggests that this type of learning occurs through changes in synaptic plasticity when two neurons are simultaneously active, resulting in increased connectivity between them. Inspired by associative learning theories, we here investigated whether the mere co-activation of visual stimuli and stimulation of the primary motor cortex using TMS would result in stimulus-response associations that can impact future behavior. During a learning phase, we repeatedly paired the presentation of a specific color (but not other colors) with a TMS pulse over the motor cortex. Next, participants performed a two-alternative forced-choice task where they had to categorize simple shapes and we studied whether the shapes' task-irrelevant color (and its potentially associated involuntary motor activity) affected the required motor response. Participants showed more errors on incongruent trials for stimuli that were previously paired with high intensity TMS pulses, but only when tested on the same day. Using a drift diffusion model for conflict tasks, we further demonstrate that this interference occurred early, and gradually increased as a function of associated TMS intensity. Taken together, our findings show that the human brain can learn stimulus-response associations using externally induced motor cortex stimulation. Although we were inspired by the Hebbian learning literature, future studies should investigate whether Hebbian or other learning processes were also what brought about this effect.

Learning where to be flexible: Using environmental cues to regulate cognitive control.

Cognitive flexibility refers to a mental state that allows efficient switching between tasks. While deciding to be flexible is often ascribed to a strategic resource-intensive executive process, people may also simply use their environment to trigger different states of cognitive flexibility. We developed a paradigm where participants were exposed to two environments with different task-switching probabilities, followed by a probe phase to test the impact of environmental cues. Our results show that people were more efficient at switching in a high-switch environment. Critically, we observe environment-specific triggering of cognitive flexibility after a 4-day training period (Experiment 2, N = 51), but not after a 1-day training period (Experiment 1, N = 52). Together, these findings suggest that people can associate the need for cognitive flexibility with their environment, providing an environmental triggering mechanism for cognitive control. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2024 APA, all rights reserved).

Learning how to reason and deciding when to decide.

Research on human reasoning has both popularized and struggled with the idea that intuitive and deliberate thoughts stem from two different systems, raising the question how people switch between them. Inspired by research on cognitive control and conflict monitoring, we argue that detecting the need for further thought relies on an intuitive, context-sensitive process that is learned in itself.

Effects of Experiencing CS-US Pairings on Instructed Fear Reversal.

Fear learning allows us to identify and anticipate aversive events and adapt our behavior accordingly. This is often thought to rely on associative learning mechanisms where an initially neutral conditioned stimulus (CS) is repeatedly paired with an aversive unconditioned stimulus (US), eventually leading to the CS also being perceived as aversive and threatening. Importantly, however, humans also show verbal fear learning. Namely, they have the ability to change their responses to stimuli rapidly through verbal instructions about CS-US pairings. Past research on the link between experience-based and verbal fear learning indicated that verbal instructions about a reversal of CS-US pairings can fully override the effects of previously experienced CS-US pairings, as measured through fear ratings, skin conductance, and fear-potentiated startle. However, it remains an open question whether such instructions can also annul learned CS representations in the brain. Here, we used a fear reversal paradigm (female and male participants) in conjunction with representational similarity analysis of fMRI data to test whether verbal instructions fully override the effects of experienced CS-US pairings in fear-related brain regions or not. Previous research suggests that only the right amygdala should show lingering representations of previously experienced threat ("pavlovian trace"). Unexpectedly, we found evidence for the residual effect of prior CS-US experience to be much more widespread than anticipated, in the amygdala but also cortical regions like the dorsal anterior cingulate or dorsolateral prefrontal cortex. This finding shines a new light on the interaction of different fear learning mechanisms, at times with unexpected consequences.SIGNIFICANCE STATEMENT Humans are able to learn about aversive stimuli both from experience (i.e., repeated pairings of conditioned stimulus (CS) and unconditioned stimulus (US; pavlovian conditioning), and from verbal instructions about stimulus pairings. Understanding how experience-based and verbal learning processes interact is key for understanding the cognitive and neural underpinnings of fear learning. We tested whether prior aversive experiences (CS-US pairings) affected subsequent verbal learning, searching for lingering threat signals after verbal instructions reversed a CS from being threatening to being safe. While past research suggested such threat signals can only be found in the amygdala, we found evidence to be much more widespread, including the medial and lateral PFC. This highlights how experience-based and verbal learning processes interact to support adaptive behavior.

The impact of free will beliefs on implicit learning.

A growing number of studies demonstrate that belief in free will (FWB) is dynamic, and can be reduced experimentally. Most of these studies assume that doing so has beneficial effects on behavior, as FWBs are thought to subdue unwanted automatic processes (e.g. racial stereotypes). However, relying on automatic processes can sometimes be advantageous, for instance during implicit learning (e.g. detecting and exploiting statistical regularities in the environment). In this registered report, we tested whether experimentally reducing FWBs positively affected implicit motor learning. We hypothesized that reducing FWBs would lead to both faster and stronger implicit learning, as measured using the alternating serial reaction time (ASRT) task. While we did show a manipulation effect on free will beliefs, there was no detectable effect on implicit learning processes. This finding adds to the growing body of evidence that free will belief manipulations do not meaningfully affect downstream behavior.

The selective use of punishments on congruent versus incongruent trials in the Stroop task.

Conflict adaptation refers to the dynamic modulation of conflict processing across successive trials and reflects improved cognitive control. Interestingly, aversive motivation can increase conflict adaptation, although it remains unclear through which process this modulation occurs because previous studies presented punishment feedback following suboptimal performance on both congruent and incongruent trials. According to integrative accounts of conflict monitoring and aversive motivation in the dorsal anterior cingulate cortex, punishment feedback following slow or erroneous performance on incongruent trials in particular should lead to improved conflict adaptation. Second, selectively increasing motivation on incongruent trials should reduce the overall congruency effect. The current study sought to test both hypotheses. Specifically, we administered the confound-minimized Stroop task to a large group of participants and manipulated the position of feedback (following either congruent or incongruent trials) and aversive motivation (tied to a monetary loss or not) across different blocks. As expected, the congruency effect was found to be smaller when punishment was coupled with incongruent versus congruent trials. However, results showed that conflict adaptation was increased when punishment feedback was selectively coupled with congruent rather than incongruent trials. Together, these results suggest that aversive motivation does not uniformly improve cognitive control but this gain appears to be context dependent.

Tenacious instructions: How to dismantle newly instructed task rules?

Humans excel in instruction following to boost performance in unfamiliar situations. We can do so through so-called prepared reflexes: Abstract instructions are instantly translated into appropriate task rules in procedural working memory, after which imperative stimuli directly trigger their corresponding responses in a ballistic, reflex-like manner. But how much control do we have over these instructed task rules when their reflexes suddenly lose their relevance? Inspired by the phenomenon of directed forgetting in declarative working memory, we here tested across four experiments whether the presentation of (implicit or explicit) task cancellation cues results in the directed dismantling of recently instructed task rules. Our findings suggest that-even when cancelation cues are actively processed-such dismantling does not occur (Experiment 1-3) unless the no-longer relevant task rules are replaced by a new set of rules (Experiment 4). These findings and their implications are discussed in the broader context of action control and working memory. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2022 APA, all rights reserved).

Reduced Primacy Bias in Autism during Early Sensory Processing.

Recent theories of autism propose that a core deficit in autism would be a less context-sensitive weighting of prediction errors. There is also first support for this hypothesis on an early sensory level. However, an open question is whether this decreased context sensitivity is caused by faster updating of one's model of the world (i.e., higher weighting of new information), proposed by predictive coding theories, or slower model updating. Here, we differentiated between these two hypotheses by investigating how first impressions shape the mismatch negativity (MMN), reflecting early sensory prediction error processing. An autism and matched control group of human adults (both n = 27, 8 female) were compared on the multi-timescale MMN paradigm, in which tones were presented that were either standard (frequently occurring) or deviant (rare), and these roles reversed every block. A well-replicated observation is that the initial model (i.e., the standard and deviant sound in the first block) influences MMN amplitudes in later blocks. If autism is characterized by faster model updating, and thus a smaller primacy bias, we hypothesized (and demonstrate using a simple reinforcement learning model) that their MMN amplitudes should be less influenced by the initial context. In line with this hypothesis, we found that MMN responses in the autism group did not differ between the initial deviant and initial standard sounds as they did in the control group. These findings are consistent with the idea that autism is characterized by faster model updating during early sensory processing, as proposed by predictive coding accounts of autism.SIGNIFICANCE STATEMENT Recent theories of autism propose that a core deficit in autism is that they are faster to update their models of the world based on new sensory information. Here, we tested this hypothesis by investigating how first impressions shape brain responses during early sensory processing, and hypothesized that individuals with autism would be less influenced by these first impressions. In line with earlier studies, our results show that early sensory processing was influenced by first impressions in a control group. However, this was not the case in an autism group. This suggests that individuals with autism are faster to abandon their initial model, and is consistent with the proposal that they are faster to update their models of the world.

Is the juice worth the squeeze? Learning the marginal value of mental effort over time.

In keeping with the view that individuals invest cognitive effort in accordance with its relative costs and benefits, reward incentives typically improve performance in tasks that require cognitive effort. At the same time, increasing effort investment may confer larger or smaller performance benefits-that is, the marginal value of effort-depending on the situation or context. On this view, we hypothesized that the magnitude of reward-induced effort modulations should depend critically on the marginal value of effort for the given context, and furthermore, the marginal value of effort of a context should be learned over time as a function of direct experience in the context. Using two well-characterized cognitive control tasks and simple computational models, we demonstrated that individuals appear to learn the marginal value of effort for different contexts. In a task-switching paradigm (Experiment 1), we found that participants initially exhibited reward-induced switch cost reductions across contexts-here, task switch rates-but over time learned to only increase effort in contexts with a comparatively larger marginal utility of effort. Similarly, in a flanker task (Experiment 2), we observed a similar learning effect across contexts defined by the proportion of incongruent trials. Together, these results enrich theories of cost-benefit effort decision-making by highlighting the importance of the (learned) marginal utility of cognitive effort. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2022 APA, all rights reserved).

Observing conflicting actions elicits conflict adaptation.

A key prediction of ideomotor theories is that action perception relies on the same mechanisms as action planning. While this prediction has received support from studies investigating action perception in one-on-one interactions, situations with multiple actors pose a challenge because in order to corepresent multiple observed actions, observers have to represent more actions in their motor system than they can physically execute. If representing multiple observed actions, like representing individual observed actions, recycles action planning processes, this should lead to response conflict by observation. In five experiments, we tested this hypothesis by investigating whether simply seeing two conflicting actions is sufficient to elicit response conflict and therefore adaptive control in the same way as planning conflicting actions does. Experiments 1-3 provided meta-analytical evidence (N = 262) that seeing two conflicting gestures triggered a reverse congruency sequence effect on a subsequent, unrelated prime-probe task. Experiment 4 (N = 250) replicated this finding in a high-powered study. Finally, Experiment 5 (N = 253) revealed that the same effect was not present when using unfolding abstract shapes instead of moving hands. Together, these experiments show that not just planning but also seeing two conflicting actions elicits adaptive control, and they provide initial evidence that this is driven by action conflict. These findings have important implications both for theories of action representation and research on cognitive control. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2022 APA, all rights reserved).

The impact of punishment on cognitive control in a clinical population characterized by heightened punishment sensitivity.

Punishments can help inform us to make adaptive changes in behavior. However, previous research suggested that only low punishment-sensitive individuals "learn" from punishment, whereas high punishment-sensitive individuals do not. Here we used a flanker interference task with performance-contingent punishment signals to test the hypothesis that a clinical group characterized by heightened punishment sensitivity (i.e., patients with anorexia nervosa [AN]) would fail to adapt to conflict following punishment. To distinguish between state and trait factors, we tested for between-group differences in separate cohorts of acutely underweight patients (acAN; n = 40) and weight-recovered former patients (recAN; n = 25) relative to age-matched healthy controls (n = 48). The acAN patients showed an abnormally reversed congruency-sequence effect in error rates following punishment, despite generally superior accuracy, suggesting that punishment distracted acAN patients and interfered with interference control. The influence of punishment was more subtle in recAN and did not reach statistical significance, but both reaction time and error rate data hinted that elevated sensitivity to punishment negatively affects cognitive control even after long-term weight normalization. Together, these findings emphasize that punishment sensitivity may be a clinically relevant trait marker in AN and provide novel experimental evidence that punishment may have a detrimental impact on adaptive behavior in the disorder. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2022 APA, all rights reserved).

Selective reinforcement of conflict processing in the Stroop task.

Motivation signals have been shown to influence the engagement of cognitive control processes. However, most studies focus on the invigorating effect of reward prospect, rather than the reinforcing effect of reward feedback. The present study aimed to test whether people strategically adapt conflict processing when confronted with condition-specific congruency-reward contingencies in a manual Stroop task. Results show that the size of the Stroop effect can be affected by selectively rewarding responses following incongruent versus congruent trials. However, our findings also suggest important boundary conditions. Our first two experiments only show a modulation of the Stroop effect in the first half of the experimental blocks, possibly due to our adaptive threshold procedure demotivating adaptive behavior over time. The third experiment showed an overall modulation of the Stroop effect, but did not find evidence for a similar modulation on test items, leaving open whether this effect generalizes to the congruency conditions, or is stimulus-specific. More generally, our results are consistent with computational models of cognitive control and support contemporary learning perspectives on cognitive control. The findings also offer new guidelines and directions for future investigations on the selective reinforcement of cognitive control processes.

Correct responses alleviate the negative evaluation of conflict.

Recent studies have demonstrated that cognitive conflict, as experienced during incongruent Stroop trials, is automatically evaluated as negative in line with theories emphasising the aversive nature of conflict. However, while this is well replicated when people only see the conflict stimuli, results are mixed when participants also respond to stimuli before evaluating them. Potentially, the positive surprise people feel when overcoming the conflict allows them to evaluate the experience as more positive. In this study, we investigated whether task experience can account for contradictory findings in the literature. Across three experiments, we observed that responding to incongruent stimuli was evaluated as negative on the first trials, but this effect disappeared after 32 trials. This contrasted with the results of a fourth experiment showing that the negative evaluation of incongruent trials did not disappear, when participants could not respond to the conflict. A re-analysis of three older experiments corroborated these results by showing that a positive evaluation of conflict only occurred after participants had some experience with the task. These results show that responding to conflict clearly changes its affective evaluation fitting with the idea that creating outcome expectancies (lower expectancies for being correct on incongruent trials) makes the experience of conflict less negative.

Social group membership does not modulate automatic imitation in a contrastive multi-agent paradigm.

A key prediction of motivational theories of automatic imitation is that people imitate in-group over out-group members. However, research on this topic has provided mixed results. Here, we investigate the possibility that social group modulations emerge only when people can directly compare in- and out-group. To this end, we conducted three experiments in which we measured automatic imitation of two simultaneously shown hands: one in-group and one out-group hand. Our general hypothesis was that the in-group hand would be imitated more than the out-group hand. However, even though both explicit and implicit manipulation checks showed that we succeeded in manipulating participants' feelings of group membership, we did not find support for the predicted influence of group membership on automatic imitation. In contrast to motivational theories, this suggests that group membership does not influence who we do or do not imitate, not even in a contrastive multi-agent paradigm.

Autistic traits are related to worse performance in a volatile reward learning task despite adaptive learning rates.

LAY ABSTRACT: Recent theories propose that autism is characterized by an impairment in determining when to learn and when not. Here, we investigated this hypothesis by estimating learning rates (i.e. the speed with which one learns) in three different environments that differed in rule stability and uncertainty. We found that neurotypical participants with more autistic traits performed worse in a volatile environment (with unstable rules), as they chose less often for the most rewarding option. Exploratory analyses indicated that performance was specifically worse when reward rules were opposite to those initially learned for participants with more autistic traits. However, there were no differences in the adjustment of learning rates between participants with more versus less autistic traits. Together, these results suggest that performance in volatile environments is lower in participants with more autistic traits, but that this performance difference cannot be unambiguously explained by an impairment in adjusting learning rates.

It is harder than you think: On the boundary conditions of exploiting congruency cues.

Humans are able to anticipate abstract task demands and prepare attentional sets accordingly. A popular method to study this ability is to include explicit cues that signal the required level of cognitive control in conflict tasks (e.g., whether or not word meaning will correspond to the task-relevant font color in a Stroop task). Here, we demonstrate that this ability is more limited than assumed by most theories. Starting from a recent finding that implicit cues on the previous trial do not aid task performance, we demonstrate that these cues remain inefficient even when participants are explicitly instructed about their meaning, when the cue-stimulus interval is prolonged, or when the cues are deterministic and blocked (Experiments 1-4). In fact, the cues sometimes even impaired performance. Extending cue-information into the intertrial interval did not help (Experiment 5), and even though we replicated previous cueing effects using explicit cues in between trials in the vocal Stroop task (Experiment 7), this effect disappeared when using manual responses or presenting the cue in the preceding trial (Experiments 6, 8, and 9), and only benefited congruent responses when the intertrial interval was reduced (Experiment 10). Together, these findings point to important boundary conditions in cued control: The ability to prepare for control demands on a trial-by-trial basis is restricted to situations in which cues are presented alone, and where the task involves a nonarbitrary stimulus-response mapping. We discuss these findings in light of recent theories that emphasize the role of event boundaries and the value of cognitive control. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2022 APA, all rights reserved).

The impact of implicit and explicit suggestions that 'there is nothing to learn' on implicit sequence learning.

We can sometimes efficiently pick up statistical regularities in our environment in the absence of clear intentions or awareness, a process typically referred to as implicit sequence learning. In the current study, we tried to address the question whether suggesting participants that there is nothing to learn can impact this form of learning. If a priori predictions or intentions to learn are important in guiding implicit learning, we reasoned that suggesting participants that there is nothing to learn in a given context should hamper implicit learning. We introduced participants to random contexts that indicated that there was nothing to learn, either implicitly (i.e., by presenting blocks of random trials in "Experiment 1"), or explicitly (i.e., by explicitly instructing them in "Experiment 2"). Next, in a subsequent learning phase, participants performed an implicit sequence learning task. We found that these implicit or explicit suggestions that 'there was nothing to learn' did not influence the emergence of implicit knowledge in the subsequent learning phase. Although these findings seem consistent with simple associative or Hebbian learning accounts of implicit sequence learning (i.e., not steered by predictions), we discuss potential limitations that should inform future studies on the role of a priori predictions in implicit learning.

Shared Neural Representations of Cognitive Conflict and Negative Affect in the Medial Frontal Cortex.

Influential theories of Medial Frontal Cortex (MFC) function suggest that the MFC registers cognitive conflict as an aversive signal, but no study directly tested this idea. Instead, recent studies suggested that nonoverlapping regions in the MFC process conflict and affect. In this preregistered human fMRI study (male and female), we used MVPAs to identify which regions respond similarly to conflict and aversive signals. The results reveal that, of all conflict- and value-related regions, only the ventral pre-supplementary motor area (or dorsal anterior cingulate cortex) showed a shared neural pattern response to different conflict and affect tasks. These findings challenge recent conclusions that conflict and affect are processed independently, and provide support for integrative views of MFC function.SIGNIFICANCE STATEMENT Multiple theories propose that the MFC, and the dorsal ACC in particular, integrates information related to suboptimal outcomes from different psychological domains (e.g., cognitive control and negative affect) with the aim of adaptively steering behavior. In contrast to recent studies in the field, we provide evidence for the idea that cognitive control and negative affect are integrated in the MFC by showing that a classification algorithm trained on discerning cognitive control (conflict vs no conflict) can predict affect (negative vs positive) in the voxel pattern response of the dorsal ACC/pre-SMA.