Learning Where to Be Flexible: Using Environmental Cues to Regulate Cognitive Control

Cognitive flexibility refers to a mental state that allows efficient switching between tasks. While deciding to be flexible is often ascribed to a strategic resource-intensive executive process, people may also simply use their environment to trigger different states of cognitive flexibility. We developed a paradigm where participants were exposed to two environments with different task-switching probabilities, followed by a probe phase to test the impact of environmental cues. Our results show that people were more efficient at switching in a high-switch environment. Critically, we observe environment-specific triggering of cognitive flexibility after a 4-day training period (Experiment 2, N = 51), but not after a 1-day training period (Experiment 1, N = 52). Together, these findings suggest that people can associate the need for cognitive flexibility with their environment, providing an environmental triggering mechanism for cognitive control.