Task sets define boundaries of learned cognitive flexibility in list-wide proportion switch manipulations

Different contexts in daily life often require varying levels of cognitive flexibility. Previous research has shown that people adapt their level of flexibility to match changing contextual demands for task switching in cued-switching paradigms that vary the proportion of switch trials within lists of trials. Specifically, the behavioral costs of switching as opposed to repeating tasks scale inversely with the proportion of switches – a finding referred to as the list-wide proportion switch (LWPS) effect. Previous research found that flexibility adaptations transferred across stimuli, but were specifically tied to task-sets, rather than block-wide changes in flexibility state. In the current study, we conducted additional tests of the hypothesis that flexibility learning is task-specific in the LWPS paradigm. In Experiments 1 and 2, we used trial-unique stimuli and unbiased task cues to control for associative learning tied to stimulus or cue features. Experiment 3 further tested whether task-specific learning occurred even for tasks performed on integrated features of the same stimuli. Across these three experiments, we found robust task-specific flexibility learning, which transferred across novel stimuli and unbiased cues and occurred regardless of stimulus feature overlap between tasks.