Senne Braem

Ghent University | UGhent · Department of Experimental Psychology

Cognitive flexibility refers to the ability to quickly reconfigure our mind, like when we switch between different tasks. This review highlights recent evidence showing that cognitive flexibility can be conditioned by simple incentives typically known to drive lower-level learning, such as stimulus-response associations. Cognitive flexibility can a...

The past two decades have witnessed an explosion of interest in the cognitive and neural mechanisms of adaptive control processes that operate in selective attention tasks. This has spawned a large empirical literature and several theories, but also recurring identification of potential confounds and corresponding adjustments in task design to crea...

The balancing of cognitive flexibility versus stability is an important everyday skill that can be learned through reinforcement and may be impaired in autism or other transdiagnostic traits. In this preregistered study (n=412), we show that rewarding people more on task switch trials led them to show more voluntary switching behaviour, but also mo...

Dynamically predicting and updating the task goals that need to be pursued is crucial in our daily life. It has been shown that people can adaptively regulate task preparation processes when the to-be-performed task varied in uncertainty. Here, we set out to investigate what mechanism can support such flexible task regulation. On one hand, people m...

Cognitive conflict is typically experienced as negative, which has been argued to drive adaptive behavior following a conflict. We tried to change the negative value of conflict using evaluative conditioning, and measured changes in conflict adaptation in a subsequent Stroop task (N = 416 Prolific participants, English native speakers from differen...

When faced with many options to choose from, humans and other agents typically need to explore the utility of new choice options. People with an autism diagnosis or elevated autism traits are thought to avoid exploring such unknown options. In a large sample (N = 588), we investigated the impact of autism diagnosis or elevated autism traits on expl...

Cognitive control refers to the ability to override prepotent response tendencies to achieve goal-directed behavior. On the other hand, reinforcement learning refers to the learning of actions through feedback and reward. Although cognitive control and reinforcement learning are often viewed as opposing forces in driving behavior, recent theories h...

Humans are remarkably efficient at adapting to different contextual demands by exerting optimal levels of cognitive flexibility versus stability for switching between different tasks. Here, we show how a recurrent neural network can be used to simulate behavioral indices of cognitive flexibility versus stability, and investigate how people learn an...

When faced with many options to choose from, humans and other agents typically need to explore the utility of new choice options. People with an autism diagnosis or elevated autism traits are thought to avoid exploring such unknown options. In a large sample (N = 588), we investigated the impact of autism diagnosis or elevated autism traits on expl...

People regularly encounter various types of conflict. Here, we ask if, and, if so, how, different types of conflict, from lab-based Stroop conflicts to everyday-life self-control or moral conflicts, are related to one other. We present a framework that assumes that action–goal representations are hierarchically organized, ranging from concrete acti...

Everyday life often requires us to switch between states of cognitive flexibility and stability. However, little is known about what drives their regulation at the meta-control level. Based on current theories of cognitive control, we tested whether the regulation of cognitive flexibility and stability is guided by reinforcement learning. Using a t...

People often have to switch back and forth between different environments that come with different problems and volatilities. While volatile environments require fast learning (i.e., high learning rates), stable environments call for lower learning rates. Previous studies have shown that people adapt their learning rates, but it remains unclear whe...

Many theories on cognitive effort start from the assumption that cognitive effort can be expended at will, and flexibly up-or down-regulated depending on expected task demand and rewards. However, while effort regulation has been investigated across a wide range of incentive conditions, few investigated the cost of effort regulation itself. Here, w...

Adaptive control refers to flexible adjustments in control settings in response to conflicting situations. There has been a long-standing debate as to whether this adaptation relies on a domain-general or domain-specific process. Recent models predict a U-shaped relation where only highly similar or highly dissimilar tasks show adaptation across ta...

Humans can up- or downregulate the degree to which they rely on task information for goal-directed behaviour, a process often referred to as cognitive control. Adjustments in cognitive control are traditionally studied in response to experienced or expected task-rule conflict. However, recent theories suggest that people can also learn to adapt con...

Classical conditioning states that the systematic co-occurrence of a neutral stimulus with an unconditioned stimulus can cause the neutral stimulus to, over time, evoke the same response as the unconditioned stimulus. On a neural level, Hebbian learning suggests that this type of learning occurs through changes in synaptic plasticity when two neuro...

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...

A key element of human flexible behavior concerns the ability to continuously predict and prepare for sudden changes in tasks or actions. Here, we tested whether people can dynamically modulate task preparation processes and decision-making strategies when the identity of a to-be-performed task becomes uncertain. To this end, we developed a new par...

Human task performance elicits diverse subjective metacognitive experiences, such as boredom, effort, fatigue and frustration, which are thought to play important roles in the monitoring and regulation of cognitive processes. Yet, their specific contributions to task performance remain poorly understood. Therefore, we investigated temporal dynamics...

Cognitive control refers to the ability to override prepotent response tendencies to achieve goal-directed behavior, while reinforcement learning typically refers to the learning of, among other things, response tendencies through feedback and reward. Although cognitive control and reinforcement learning are often viewed as opposing forces in drivi...

Research on human reasoning has both popularized and struggled with the idea that intuitive and deliberate thoughts stem from two different systems, raising the question how people switch between them. Inspired by research on cognitive control and conflict monitoring, we argue that detecting the need for further thought relies on an intuitive, cont...

Classical conditioning states that the systematic co-occurrence of a neutral stimulus with an unconditioned stimulus can cause the neutral stimulus to, over time, evoke the same response as the unconditioned stimulus. On a neural level, Hebbian learning suggests that this type of learning occurs through changes in synaptic plasticity when two neuro...

Fear learning allows us to identify and anticipate aversive events, and adapt our behavior accordingly. This is often thought to rely on associative learning mechanisms where an initially neutral conditioned stimulus (CS) is repeatedly paired with an aversive unconditioned stimulus (US), eventually leading to the CS also being perceived as aversive...

Humans can up- or downregulate the degree to which they rely on task information for goal directed behaviour, a process often referred to as cognitive control. Adjustments in cognitive control are traditionally studied in response to experienced or expected task-rule conflict. However, recent theories suggest that people can also learn to adapt con...

In everyday life, people often have to switch back and forth between different environments that come with different problems and volatilities. While volatile environments require fast learning (i.e., high learning rate), stable environments call for lower learning rates. Previous studies have shown that people can adapt their learning rate while r...

A growing number of studies demonstrate that belief in free will (FWB) is dynamic, and can be reduced experimentally. Most of these studies assume that doing so has beneficial effects on behavior, as FWBs are thought to subdue unwanted automatic processes (e.g. racial stereotypes). However, relying on automatic processes can sometimes be advantageo...

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 mental flexibility. We developed a paradigm where participants were exposed to...

A growing number of studies demonstrate that belief in free will (FWB) is dynamic, and can be reduced experimentally. Most of these studies assume that doing so has beneficial effects on behavior, as FWBs are thought to subdue unwanted automatic processes (e.g. racial stereotypes). However, relying on automatic processes can sometimes be advantageo...

Task switching refers to the effortful mental process of shifting attention between different tasks. While it is well-established that task switching usually comes with an objective performance cost, recent studies have shown that people also subjectively evaluate task switching as negative. An open question is whether this affective evaluation of...

Conflict adaptation refers to the dynamic modulation of conflict processing across successive trials and reflects improved cognitive control. Interestingly, aversive motivation can increase conflict adaptation, although it remains unclear through which process this modulation occurs because previous studies presented punishment feedback following s...

Humans excel in instruction following to boost performance in unfamiliar situations. We can do so through so-called prepared reflexes: Abstract instructions are instantly translated into appropriate task rules in procedural working memory, after which imperative stimuli directly trigger their corresponding responses in a ballistic, reflex-like mann...

Fear learning allows us to identify and anticipate aversive events, and adapt our behavior accordingly. This is often thought to rely on associative learning mechanisms where an initially neutral conditioned stimulus (CS) is repeatedly paired with an aversive unconditioned stimulus (US), eventually leading to the CS also being perceived as aversive...

In keeping with the view that individuals invest cognitive effort in accordance with its relative costs and benefits, reward incentives typically improve performance in tasks that require cognitive effort. At the same time, increasing effort investment may confer larger or smaller performance benefits-that is, the marginal value of effort-depending...

Recent theories of autism propose that a core deficit in autism would be a less context-sensitive weighting of prediction errors. There is also first support for this hypothesis on an early sensory level. However, an open question is whether this decreased context sensitivity is caused by faster updating of one???s model of the world (i.e., higher...

Punishments can help inform us to make adaptive changes in behavior. However, previous research suggested that only low punishment-sensitive individuals "learn" from punishment, whereas high punishment-sensitive individuals do not. Here we used a flanker interference task with performance-contingent punishment signals to test the hypothesis that a...

A key prediction of ideomotor theories is that action perception relies on the same mechanisms as action planning. While this prediction has received support from studies investigating action perception in one-on-one interactions, situations with multiple actors pose a challenge because in order to corepresent multiple observed actions, observers h...

Motivation signals have been shown to influence the engagement of cognitive control processes. However, most studies focus on the invigorating effect of reward prospect, rather than the reinforcing effect of reward feedback. The present study aimed to test whether people strategically adapt conflict processing when confronted with condition-specifi...

We can sometimes efficiently pick up statistical regularities in our environment in the absence of clear intentions or awareness, a process typically referred to as implicit sequence learning. In the current study, we tried to address the question whether suggesting participants that there is nothing to learn can impact this form of learning. If a...

In keeping with the view that individuals invest cognitive effort in accordance with its relative costs and benefits, reward incentives typically improve performance in tasks that require cognitive effort. At the same time, increasing effort investment may confer larger or smaller performance benefits—i.e., the marginal value of effort—depending on...

Motivation signals have been shown to influence the engagement of cognitive control processes. However, most studies focus on the invigorating effect of reward prospect, rather than the reinforcing effect of reward feedback. The present study aimed to test whether people strategically adapt conflict processing when confronted with condition-specifi...

Lay abstract: Recent theories propose that autism is characterized by an impairment in determining when to learn and when not. Here, we investigated this hypothesis by estimating learning rates (i.e. the speed with which one learns) in three different environments that differed in rule stability and uncertainty. We found that neurotypical particip...

Recent studies have demonstrated that cognitive conflict, as experienced during incongruent Stroop-trials, is automatically evaluated as negative in line with theories emphasizing the aversive nature of conflict. However, while this is well-replicated when people only see the conflict stimuli, results are mixed when participants also respond to sti...

A key prediction of motivational theories of automatic imitation is that people imitate in-group over out-group members. However, research on this topic has provided mixed results. Here, we investigate the possibility that social group modulations emerge only when people can directly compare in- and out-group. To this end, we conducted three experi...

A key prediction of ideomotor theories is that action perception relies on the same mechanisms as action planning. While this prediction has received support from studies investigating action perception in one-on-one situations, situations with multiple actors pose a challenge because in order to co-represent multiple observed actions, observers ha...

Recent proposals emphasize the role of learning in empirical markers of conflict adaptation. Some of these proposals are rooted in the assumption that contingency learning works not only on stimulus–response events but also on covert processes such as selective attention. In the present study, we explored how these learning processes may apply to t...

Influential theories of Medial Frontal Cortex (MFC) function suggest that the MFC registers cognitive conflict as an aversive signal, but no study directly tested this idea. Instead, recent studies suggested that nonoverlapping regions in the MFC process conflict and affect. In this preregistered human fMRI study (male and female), we used MVPAs to...

Background Recent theories of autism propose that a core deficit in autism would be a less context-sensitive weighting of prediction errors. There is also first support for this hypothesis on an early sensory level. However, an open question is whether this decreased context-sensitivity is caused by faster updating of one’s model of the world (i.e....

Whether you believe free will exists has profound effects on your behaviour, across different levels of processing, from simple motor action to social cognition. It is therefore important to understand which specific lay theories are held in the general public and why. Past research largely focused on investigating free will beliefs (FWB, ‘Do you t...

Data analysis workflows in many scientific domains have become increasingly complex and flexible. Here we assess the effect of this flexibility on the results of functional magnetic resonance imaging by asking 70 independent teams to analyse the same dataset, testing the same 9 ex-ante hypotheses¹. The flexibility of analytical approaches is exempl...

A key prediction of motivational theories of automatic imitation is that people imitate in-group over out-group members. However, research on this topic has provided mixed results. Here, we investigate the possibility that social group modulations emerge only when people can directly compare in- and out-group. To this end, we conducted three experi...

Recent studies have demonstrated that cognitive conflict, as experienced during incongruent Stroop-trials, is automatically evaluated as negative in line with theories emphasizing the aversive nature of conflict. However, while this is well-replicated when people only see the conflict stimuli, results are mixed when participants also respond to sti...

Humans are able to anticipate abstract task demands and prepare attentional sets accordingly. A popular method to study this ability is to include explicit cues that signal the required level of cognitive control in conflict tasks (e.g., whether or not word meaning will correspond to the task-relevant font color in a Stroop task). Here, we demonstr...

Humans are very efficient at learning new behaviors through verbal instructions, bypassing the need for trial-and-error learning. However, we encounter a plethora of instructions in daily life, which raises the question how people can quickly determine when to rely on certain instructions, and how strongly. Recent theories emphasize that abstract f...

A common idea about individuals with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) is that they have an above‐average preference for predictability and sameness. However, surprisingly little research has gone toward this core symptom, and some studies suggest the preference for predictability in ASD might be less general than commonly assumed. Here, we investigat...

Data analysis workflows in many scientific domains have become increasingly complex and flexible. To assess the impact of this flexibility on functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) results, the same dataset was independently analyzed by 70 teams, testing nine ex-ante hypotheses. The flexibility of analytic approaches is exemplified by the fac...

Recent predictive coding theories propose that autism spectrum disorder (ASD) is characterized by an impairment in determining when to learn and when not. Here, we investigated this hypothesis by estimating learning rate in three different environments that differed in volatility and uncertainty. Specifically, using a dimensional approach, we corre...

Influential theories of dorsal anterior cingulate cortex (dACC) function suggest that the dACC registers cognitive conflict as an aversive signal, but no study directly tested this idea. In this pre-registered human fMRI study, we used multivariate pattern analyses to identify which regions respond similarly to conflict and aversive signals. The re...

In contrast to traditional conflict paradigms, which measure interference from (over)trained associations, recent paradigms have been introduced that investigate automatic interference from newly instructed, but never executed, associations. In these prospective-instruction paradigms, participants receive new task instructions (e.g., if cat press l...

Conflict adaptation refers to our ability to modulate our attention in line with changing situational demands, so we can engage in goal-directed behavior. While there is ample evidence demonstrating that such adaptation in conflict tasks can be captured using different response modalities, it remains unknown whether these effects rely on domain-gen...

Recent studies suggest that humans prefer information that is linked to the process of prediction. Yet it remains to be specified whether preference judgments are biased to information that can be predicted, or information that enables to predict. We here use a serial reaction time task to disentangle these two options. In a first learning phase, p...

Previous research has shown that motivational signals bias action over inaction, which may be due to putative inherent valence-action mappings, similar to those observed in the emotional domain. In the present functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) study we sought to investigate the neural underpinnings of such reward-related response tendenc...

Many psychologists and neuroscientists still see executive functions as independent, domain-general, supervisory functions, that are often dissociated from more “low-level” associative learning. Here, we suggest that executive functions very much build on associative learning, and argue that executive functions might be better understood as culture...

Task switching refers to the demanding cognitive control process that allows us to flexibly switch between different task contexts. It is a seminal observation that task switching comes with a performance cost (i.e., switch cost), but recent theories suggest that task switching could also carry an affective cost. In two experiments, we investigated...

Verbal instructions are a powerful pathway to learn new fear relations, and an important question has been what fear experience can still add to the effect of such instructions.Therefore, in previous studies, we investigated the effects of pairings between conditioned stimuli (CS) and unconditioned stimuli (US) after CS-US contingency instructions....

Verbal instructions are central to humans’ capacity to learn new behaviors with minimal training, but the neurocognitive mechanisms involved in verbally instructed behaviors remain puzzling. Recent functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) evidence suggests that the right middle frontal gyrus and premotor cortex (rMFG-dPMC) supports the translat...

Background: Recent predictive coding accounts of autism spectrum disorder (ASD) suggest that a key deficit in ASD concerns the inflexibility in modulating local prediction errors as a function of global top-down expectations. As a direct test of this central hypothesis, we used electroencephalography to investigate whether local prediction error pr...

Whereas psychology knows a long tradition of studies that focused on the role of practice and training in acquiring new skills or knowledge, systematic studies into learning via instructions remain relatively scarce. This is surprising given the tremendous influence instructions have on human behavior and cognition. In recent years, however, a (re)...

Most reward studies focus on the reinforcement of simple tasks or stimulus-response rules. However, recent theories (re)emphasized that cognitive control representations should adhere to the same reinforcement learning principles as do more basic stimulus and response representations. This study focused on the act of switching between different tas...