Transfer of Learned Cognitive Flexibility to Novel Stimuli and Task Sets.

ABSTRACT: Adaptive behavior requires learning about the structure of one's environment to derive optimal action policies, and previous studies have documented transfer of such structural knowledge to bias choices in new environments. Here, we asked whether people could also acquire and transfer more abstract knowledge across different task environments, specifically expectations about cognitive control demands. Over three experiments, participants (Amazon Mechanical Turk workers; N = ~80 adults per group) performed a probabilistic card-sorting task in environments of either a low or high volatility of task rule changes (requiring low or high cognitive flexibility, respectively) before transitioning to a medium-volatility environment. Using reinforcement-learning modeling, we consistently foun

SUBMITTER: Wen T 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC10236430 | biostudies-literature | 2023 Apr

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature