Maybe You Can Have It Both Ways: No Stability-Flexibility “Tradeoff” With Item-Specific Control

Cognitive stability refers to remaining on task and ignoring distractors, while flexibility refers to switching between task rules. "Tradeoff" theories of stability and flexibility suggest that if one is engaged, the other is inhibited, like a see-saw. Allocating control to an item, under this view, should result in greater persistence of the task rule upon switching to a new task, yielding higher switch costs. Under other theories that posit independence of stability and flexibility, recruiting stability for an item should not affect future attempts at interacting flexibly with it, or vice versa. By creating item-specific associations with higher switching or higher stability requirements, this research examines the independence of flexibility and stability in visual attentional control. The association phase (804 trials) consisted of task switching (age identification vs gender identification tasks determined by frame color; Experiment 1) or an emotional Stroop task (Experiment 2). Half of the identities shown were associated with the more challenging task (Mostly Task Switching or Mostly Incongruent Stroop, respectively) while half were associated with the easier task (Mostly Task Repetition or Mostly Congruent Stroop). The subsequent transfer phase (160 trials) tested the impact of these associations. For Experiment 1, participants performed an Emotion Stroop task. Crucially, the stimuli were the same faces previously associated with a switching likelihood–so, if participants are less “stable” on faces they learned were Mostly Switching faces, their congruency effects should be larger. In Experiment 2, the transfer phase consisted of task switching, where we examined whether switch costs were associated with the faces’ associated proportion of congruency. In both cases, we found no evidence of impact on future engagement of control.