A key challenge in cognitive control research is understanding how humans flexibly adjust their behaviour in response to changing environmental and motivational demands. This symposium centres on the concept of cognitive flexibility, commonly defined as the ability to shift between distinct thoughts, strategies, or perspectives in response to situational requirements. We aim to bring together complementary perspectives examining how contextual regularities, affective and motivational factors shape the dynamic balance between cognitive flexibility and stability. By combining manipulations of switch probability, conflict adaptation, and reward, the symposium highlights how experience and expectations guide adaptive control allocation across different domains.
Amy Strivens (University of Tübingen) investigates interactions between global and local control by combining switch-probability manipulations with the congruency sequence effect (CSE), offering new insights into how control operates across multiple temporal scales.
Linda Carmen Bräutigam (University of Tübingen) explores the interaction between context-specific proportion congruency (CSPC) and switch probability across three conflict paradigms (Simon, Stroop, and Flanker), revealing how adaptive control mechanisms generalize across tasks while remaining sensitive to contextual predictability.
Luca Moretti (University of Milano-Bicocca) presents evidence for a flexibility–stability trade-off when using valency rather than congruency as a measure of cognitive stability, thereby broadening theoretical accounts of how control adjustments manifest across cognitive dimensions.
Larissa Walter (University of Freiburg) examines the impact of contingent versus non-contingent reward on switch rate and switch costs in the self-organized task switching paradigm, highlighting how different reward types modulate task performance and task selection behaviour.
Finally, Jonathan Mendl (University of Regensburg) investigates how reward expectation shapes adjustments of flexibility, showing that rare high rewards heighten the sensitivity to increasing and remaining high reward.
Overall, the symposium seeks to advance our understanding of cognitive flexibility as a key mechanism of adaptive behaviour. Considering evidence across different paradigms and approaches, the symposium highlights how control dynamics emerge from the interaction of contextual expectations, task demands, affective and motivational states—offering a more comprehensive understanding of how flexible behaviour is achieved.