Are We More Flexible Under Non-Contingent Reward? The Impact of Different Reward Types on Cognitive Flexibility

11:00 - 12:30

Switching It Up: How Task- and Reward-Regularities Shape Cognitive Flexibility

Room: HSZ - N1

Chair/s:

Linda Carmen Bräutigam, Irina Monno, Amy Strivens

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.

Submission 274

Are We More Flexible Under Non-Contingent Reward? The Impact of Different Reward Types on Cognitive Flexibility

SymposiumTalk-05

Presented by: Larissa Walter

Larissa Walter ^{1, 2}, Anne Voormann ², Irina Monno ², Andrea Kiesel ²

¹ Freiburg Institute for Basic Income Studies, University of Freiburg, Germany

² Department for Cognition, Action, and Sustainability, University of Freiburg, Germany

Previous studies have shown that reward can modulate the dynamic balance between cognitive flexibility and stability. Earlier research on how changing reward magnitude impacts behavior in task switching paradigms has demonstrated, that increasing reward between two trials leads to decreased switch costs and increased switch rates compared to remaining high reward. This suggests that increasing reward leads to more flexible behavior. While most studies focus on contingent reward, in the present study we focused on the potential impact of different types of reward on task choice and task performance using the self-organized task switching paradigm.

Building on earlier findings and the theoretical framework proposed by Notebaert and Braem (2015), we hypothesized that non-contingent reward would promote cognitive flexibility—reflected in higher switch rates and lower switch costs—compared to contingent reward. Across two experiments, we compared a contingent reward, a non-contingent reward, and a no-reward condition using a within-subjects design. In Experiment 1 (n = 96), only contingent reward showed smaller switch rates and larger switch costs compared to the no-reward condition. Non-contingent reward did not differ significantly from no-reward or contingent reward. Although Experiment 2 (n = 64) aimed to strengthen the manipulation of type of reward by additionally presenting scenario texts introducing a contingent vs. a non-contingent situation, the expected effects were not replicated.

Overall, the results suggest that contingent reward may reduce cognitive flexibility in task switching, whereas no evidence was found for an effect of non-contingent reward on cognitive flexibility.

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