Control in context: The theta rhythm provides evidence for reactive control but no evidence for proactive control.

A prime goal of psychological science is to understand how humans can flexibly adapt to rapidly changing contexts. The foundation of this cognitive flexibility rests on contextual adjustments of cognitive control, which can be tested using the list-wide proportion congruency effect (LWPC). Blocks with mostly incongruent (MI) trials show smaller conflict interference effects compared to blocks with mostly congruent (MC) trials.

Flexibility by association? No evidence for an influence of cue-transition associations on voluntary task switching.

Some situations require cognitive flexibility, whereas others call for cognitive stability. Recent theories posit lower-level associative learning processes as the basis of contextual control. The present study incorporates six experiments to investigate whether cognitive flexibility can be triggered by task-irrelevant color cues in the task-switching paradigm.

The role of objective and introspective switch costs in voluntary task choice.

Human beings are cognitive misers. One facet of this effort avoidance is the reluctance to voluntarily switch tasks when repeating the same task is allowed. Yet participants voluntarily switch despite the resulting costs.

Investigating anticipatory processes during sequentially changing reward prospect: An ERP study.

Performance-contingent reward prospect modulates the stability-flexibility balance in voluntary task switching. High reward prospect typically increases stability, indicated by a low voluntary switch rate (VSR). But this effect depends on the immediate reward history: Only when a high reward repeats (reward remains high), stability is increased.

Are You Keeping an Eye on Me? The Influence of Competition and Cooperation on Joint Simon Task Performance.

Social interaction plays an important role in human life. While there are instances that require cooperation, there are others that force people to compete rather than to cooperate, in order to achieve certain goals. A key question is how the deployment of attention differs between cooperative and competitive situation; however, empirical investigations have yielded inconsistent results.