Modulation of the Shielding-Shifting Balance by Instruction and Reward

Everyday life confronts us with situations requiring us to flexibly shift between goals or to shield our intentions from distractions to varying degrees. Control dilemma theory posits that individuals adjust their balance between goal shielding and shifting dynamically to meet changing control demands. These different control modes are assumed to afford complementary performance benefits and costs. Despite growing interest in the mechanisms underlying cognitive control regulations, only few studies have directly tested this assumption and recent findings have even called into question the notion of an obligatory shielding-shifting trade-off (Geddert & Egner, 2022). The objectives of our study were to investigate whether such control adjustments are under volitional control, to test the assumption of a shielding-shifting trade-off, and to examine if the task relevance of distracting information moderates control mode adaptations. To this end, we used two task-switching paradigms differing in the informative content of distractors. In a within-subjects design, we instructed participants either to focus their attention on the current task (goal shielding) or to try to switch flexibly between tasks (goal shifting) to maximize their monetary reward. Participants adjusted their goal shifting according to the instruction, as indicated by reduced task-switch costs in the shifting condition. However, participants did not succeed in implementing the shielding instruction, i.e., participants’ performance was equally impaired by interfering information in both conditions. In line with the control dilemma theory, participants displayed the expected pattern of reciprocal performance benefits and costs. We further found no effect of distractor relevance on control mode adaptations.