How Sequentially Changing Reward Prospect Modulates Meta-control: Increasing Reward Prospect Promotes Cognitive Flexibil
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How Sequentially Changing Reward Prospect Modulates Meta-control: Increasing Reward Prospect Promotes Cognitive Flexibility Kerstin Fröber 1
&
Gesine Dreisbach 1
# The Author(s) 2020
Abstract Meta-control is necessary to regulate the balance between cognitive stability and flexibility. Evidence from (voluntary) task switching studies suggests performance-contingent reward as one modulating factor. Depending on the immediate reward history, reward prospect seems to promote either cognitive stability or flexibility: Increasing reward prospect reduced switch costs and increased the voluntary switch rate, suggesting increased cognitive flexibility. In contrast, remaining high reward prospect increased switch costs and reduced the voluntary switch rate, suggesting increased cognitive stability. Recently we suggested that increasing reward prospect serves as a meta-control signal toward cognitive flexibility by lowering the updating threshold in working memory. However, in task switching paradigms with two tasks only, this could alternatively be explained by facilitated switching to the other of two tasks. To address this issue, a series of task switching experiments with uncued task switching between three univalent tasks was conducted. Results showed a reduction in reaction time (RT) switch costs to a nonsignificant difference and a high voluntary switch rate when reward prospect increased, whereas repetition RTs were faster, switch RTs slower, and voluntary switch rate was reduced when reward prospect remained high. That is, increasing reward prospect put participants in a state of equal readiness to respond to any target stimulus—be it a task repetition or a switch to one of the other two tasks. The study thus provides further evidence for the assumption that increasing reward prospect serves as a metacontrol signal to increase cognitive flexibility, presumably by lowering the updating threshold in working memory. Keywords Meta-control . Reward . Flexibility . Stability . Task switching
How sequentially changing reward prospect modulates cognitive flexibility and stability Prominent theories suggest that cognitive control is best characterized not as a unitary function, but instead as a set of complementary control functions supposedly mediated by differential activity modes of the neurotransmitters dopamine and/or norepinephrine (Aston-Jones & Cohen, 2005; Braver, This research was funded by German Research Foundation (Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft, DFG), grant no DR 392/10-1 Electronic supplementary material The online version of this article (https://doi.org/10.3758/s13415-020-00825-1) contains supplementary material, which is available to authorized users. * Kerstin Fröber [email protected] 1
Department of Psychology, University of Regensburg, Universitätsstr. 31, D-93053 Regensburg, Germany
2012; Braver et al., 2014; Cohen, Aston-Jones, & Gilzenrat, 2004; Cools & D'Esposito, 2011; Durstewitz & Seamans, 2008; Goschke, 2003, 2013; Hommel, 2015; Miyake et al., 2000). A commonali
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