Tobias Egner

Duke University | DU · Psychology & Neuroscience

Inferential decision-making algorithms typically assume that an underlying probabilistic model of decision alternatives and outcomes may be learned a priori or online. Furthermore, when applied to robots in real-world settings they often perform unsatisfactorily or fail to accomplish the necessary tasks because this assumption is violated and/or be...

Cognitive stability, the ability to focus on a current task, and cognitive flexibility, the ability to switch between different tasks, are traditionally conceptualized as opposing end-points on a one-dimensional continuum. This assumption obligates a stability-flexibility trade-off – greater stability equates to less flexibility, and vice versa. In...

Adaptive behavior often requires using structured internal representations about the external world, such as bringing to mind relevant side-streets when encountering a detour on your way home from work. These internal representations are collectively referred to as cognitive maps. Given their fundamental importance to representing spatial, temporal...

While the influence of context on long-term memory (LTM) is well-documented, its effects on the interaction between working memory (WM) and LTM remain less understood. In this study, we explored these interactions using a delayed match-to-sample task, where participants (6 Male, 16 Female) encountered the same target object across six consecutive t...

Cognitive control processes are central to adaptive behavior, but how control is applied in a context-appropriate manner is not fully understood. One way to produce context-sensitive control is by mnemonically linking particular control settings to specific stimuli that demanded those settings in a prior encounter. In support of this episodic reins...

Adaptive behavior in the real world involves navigating competing goals in a constantly changing environment. Doing so requires cognitive flexibility across multiple domains, including flexibility for switching between tasks, i.e., activating the appropriate rules for stimulus-response associations, and flexibility for shifting attention between di...

The efficient utilization of limited working memory (WM) resources involves transferring task-relevant information to long-term memory (LTM) through repetition. While the interaction between context and LTM has been extensively studied, its influence on the dynamics between WM and LTM is less understood. In this study, we explored these dynamics us...

The capacity for goal-directed behavior relies on the generation and implementation of task sets. While task sets are traditionally defined as mnemonic ensembles linking task goals to stimulus–response mappings, we here asked the question whether they may also entail information about task difficulty: does the level of focus required for performing...

An individual's readiness to switch tasks (cognitive flexibility) varies over time, in part, as the result of reinforcement learning based on the statistical structure of the world around them. Consequently, the behavioral cost associated with task-switching is smaller in contexts where switching is frequent than where it is rare, but the underlyin...

Our daily experiences unfold continuously, but we remember them as a series of discrete events through a process called event segmentation. Prominent theories of event segmentation suggest that event boundaries in memory are triggered by significant shifts in the external environment, such as a change in one’s physical surroundings. In this review,...

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 s...

Working memory (WM) describes the temporary storage of task-relevant items and procedural rules to guide action. In spite of its central importance for goal-directed behavior, the interplay between WM and long-term memory (LTM) remains poorly understood. Recent studies have shown that repeated use of the same task-relevant item in WM results in a h...

Target detection has been found to enhance memory for concurrently presented stimuli under dual-task conditions. This “attentional boost effect” is reminiscent of findings in the event memory literature, where conditions giving rise to event boundaries have been shown to enhance memory for boundary items. Target detection commonly requires a workin...

Throughout the 20th century, the psychological literature has considered attention as being primarily directed at the outside world. More recent theories conceive attention as also operating on internal information, and mounting evidence suggests a single, shared attentional focus between external and internal information. Such sharing implies a co...

Goal-directed behavior relies on maintaining relevant goals in working memory (WM) and updating them when required. Computational modeling, behavioral, and neuroimaging work has previously identified the processes and brain regions involved in selecting, updating, and maintaining declarative information, such as letters and pictures. However, the n...

Target detection has been found to enhance memory for concurrently presented stimuli under dual-task conditions. This “attentional boost effect” is reminiscent of findings in the event memory literature, where conditions giving rise to event boundaries have been shown to enhance memory for boundary items. Target detection commonly requires a workin...

Adaptive behavior requires learning about the structure of one’s environment to derive optimal action policies, and previous studies have documented transfer of such structural knowledge to bias choices in new environments. Here, we asked whether people could also acquire and transfer more abstract knowledge across different task environments, spec...

The multiple-demand (MD) network is sensitive to many aspects of cognitive demand, showing increased activation with more difficult tasks. However, it is currently unknown whether the MD network is modulated by the context in which task difficulty is experienced. Using functional magnetic resonance imaging, we examined MD network responses to low,...

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 s...

The hippocampus has been a focus of memory research since H.M’s surgery abolished his ability to form new memories, yet its mechanistic role in memory remains debated. Here, we identify a candidate memory mechanism: an anticipatory hippocampal “convergence state”, observed while awaiting valuable information, and which predicts subsequent learning....

The multiple-demand (MD) network is sensitive to many aspects of cognitive demand, showing increased activation with more difficult tasks. However, it is currently unknown whether the MD network is modulated by the context in which task difficulty is experienced. Using fMRI, we examined MD network responses to low, medium, and high difficulty arith...

Meaningful changes in context create “event boundaries”, segmenting continuous experience into distinct episodes in memory. A foundational finding in this literature is that event boundaries impair memory for the temporal order of stimuli spanning a boundary compared to equally spaced stimuli within an event. This seems surprising in light of intui...

Cognitive control is guided by learning, as people adjust control to meet changing task demands. The two best-studied instances of “control-learning” are the enhancement of attentional task focus in response to increased frequencies of incongruent distracter stimuli, reflected in the list-wide proportion congruent (LWPC) effect, and the enhancement...

Adaptive behavior requires the ability to focus on a current task and protect it from distraction (cognitive stability), as well as the ability to rapidly switch to another task in light of changing circumstances (cognitive flexibility). Cognitive stability and flexibility have been conceptualized as opposite endpoints on a stability-flexibility tr...

Throughout the 20th century, the psychological literature has considered attention as being primarily directed at the outside world. More recent theories conceive attention as also operating on internal, mnemonic information, and mounting evidence suggests a shared attentional focus - and overlapping representations - between external and internal...

People segregate continuously unfolding experiences into discrete events in memory. This process, known as event segmentation, results in better memory for the temporal order of experiences within an event and expands subjective temporal distance for items encoded across event boundaries. Previous research has suggested that the creation of event b...

It has been proposed that cognitive control processes may be implemented in a contextually appropriate manner through the encoding, and cued retrieval, of associations between stimuli and the control processes that were active during their encoding, forming “stimulus-control bindings” as part of episodic event files. Prior work has found strong evi...

It has been known for >50 years that making an error leads to subsequent changes in performance, yet the exact nature of posterror adjustments in cognition remains debated. We posit that this is in large part due to traditional performance indices, like mean posterror response time and accuracy, being insensitive measures of trial-by-trial stimulus...

To adaptively interact with the uncertainties of daily life, we must match our level of cognitive flexibility to contextual demands—being more flexible when frequent shifting between different tasks is required and more stable when the current task requires a strong focus of attention. Such cognitive flexibility adjustments in response to changing...

Meaningful changes in context create "event boundaries", segmenting continuous experience into distinct episodes in memory. A foundational finding in this literature is that event boundaries impair memory for the temporal order of stimuli spanning a boundary compared to equally spaced stimuli within an event. This seems surprising in light of intui...

Adaptive behavior is characterized by our ability to create, maintain, and update (or switch) rules by which we categorize and respond to stimuli across changing contexts (cognitive flexibility). Recent research suggests that people can link the control process of task-switching to contextual cues through associative learning, whereby the behaviora...

Current cognitive control accounts view goal-directed behavior as striking a balance between two antagonistic control demands: Stability, on the one hand, reflects a rigid, focused state of control and flexibility, while on the other, reflects a relaxed, distractible state, whereby goals can be rapidly updated to meet unexpected changes in demands....

The guiding question of this special issue is how people learn to adapt control in a context-sensitive manner ("control learning"). Broadly speaking, the hypothesis probed by the articles herein is that this occurs via learning about regularities in the (task) environment, which in turn guides the engagement of control. This can take place in the f...

Cognitive control describes the ability to use internal goals to strategically guide how we process and respond to our environment. Changes in the environment lead to adaptation in control strategies. This type of control learning can be observed in performance adjustments in response to varying proportions of easy to hard trials over blocks of tri...

Adaptive behavior requires the ability to focus on a current task and protect it from distraction (cognitive stability) as well as the ability to rapidly switch to another task in light of changing circumstances (cognitive flexibility). Cognitive stability and flexibility have commonly been conceptualized as opposite endpoints on a stability-flexib...

The one-shot pairing of a stimulus with a specific cognitive control process, such as task switching, can bind the two together in memory. The episodic control-binding hypothesis posits that the formation of temporary stimulus-control bindings, which are held in event-files supported by episodic memory, can guide the contextually appropriate applic...

Adaptive behavior requires learning about the structure of one’s environment to derive optimal action policies, and previous studies have documented transfer of such structural knowledge to bias choices in new environments. Here, we asked whether people could also acquire and transfer more abstract knowledge across different task environments, spec...

Classical theories of attention posit that integration of features into object representation (or feature binding) requires engagement of focused attention. Studies challenging this idea have demonstrated that feature binding can happen outside of the focus of attention for familiar objects, as well as for arbitrary color-orientation conjunctions....

The hippocampus has been a focus of memory research since H.M's surgery in 1953 abolished his ability to form new memories, yet its mechanistic role in memory is still debated. Here, we identify a novel, systems-level candidate memory mechanism: an anticipatory hippocampal 'convergence state', observed while awaiting valuable information, that both...

An influential view of working memory (WM) holds that its contents are controlled by a selective gating mechanism that allows for relevant perceptual information to enter WM when opened, but shields WM contents from interference when closed. In support of this idea, prior studies using the reference-back paradigm have established behavioral costs f...

The one-shot pairing of a stimulus with a specific cognitive control process, such as task switching, can bind the two together in memory. The episodic control-binding hypothesis posits that the formation of temporary stimulus-control bindings, which are held in event-files supported by episodic memory, can guide the contextually appropriate applic...

Attention and working memory (WM) have classically been considered as two separate cognitive functions, but more recent theories have conceptualized them as operating on shared representations and being distinguished primarily by whether attention is directed internally (WM) or externally (attention, traditionally defined). Supporting this idea, a...

Cognitive control is guided by learning, as people adjust control to meet changing task demands. The two best-studied instances of “control-learning” are the enhancement of attentional task focus in response to increased frequencies of incongruent distracter stimuli, reflected in the list-wide proportion congruent (LWPC) effect, and the enhancement...

To achieve our moment-to-moment goals, we must often keep information temporarily in mind. Yet, this working memory (WM) may compete with demands for our attention in the environment. Attentional and WM functions are thought to operate by similar underlying principles, and they often engage overlapping fronto-parietal brain regions. In a recent fMR...

People form associations between stimuli and responses, resulting in faster responses to stimuli that occur more frequently. This type of stimulus-response contingency learning has often been claimed to confound putative effects of cognitive control in conflict tasks, like the Stroop task. However, the underlying assumption that contingency learnin...

Humans show a pervasive bias for processing self- over other-related information, including in working memory (WM), where people prioritize the maintenance of self- (over other-) associated cues. To elucidate the neural mechanisms underlying this self-bias, we paired a self- vs. other-associated spatial WM task with functional magnetic resonance im...

Adaptive behavior is characterized by our ability to create, maintain, and update (or switch) rules by which we categorize and respond to stimuli across changing contexts (cognitive flexibility). Recent research suggests that people can link the control process of task-switching to contextual cues through associative learning, whereby the behaviora...

Working memory (WM) needs to protect current content from interference and simultaneously be amenable to rapid updating with newly relevant information. An influential model suggests these opposing requirements are met via a BG-thalamus gating mechanism that allows for selective updating of pFC WM representations. A large neuroimaging literature su...

Cognitive control describes the ability to use internal goals to strategically guide how we process and respond to our environment. Changes in the environment lead to adaptation in control strategies. This type of control-learning can be observed in performance adjustments in response to varying proportions of easy to hard trials over blocks of tri...

An influential view of working memory (WM) holds that its’ contents are controlled by a selective gating mechanism that allows for relevant perceptual information to enter WM when opened, but shields WM contents from interference when closed. In support of this idea, prior studies using the reference-back paradigm have established behavioral costs...

Adaptive behavior requires finding, and adjusting, an optimal tradeoff between focusing on a current task-set (cognitive stability) and updating that task-set when the environment changes (cognitive flexibility). Such dynamic adjustments of cognitive flexibility are observed in cued task-switching paradigms, where switch costs tend to decrease as t...

At present, the process of switching attention between external stimuli and internal representations is not well understood. To address this, Verschooren, Liefooghe, Brass, and Pourtois (2019) recently designed a novel paradigm where participants were cued to switch attention between external and internal information on a trial-by-trial basis. The...

The ability to switch efficiently between different tasks underpins cognitive flexibility and is impaired in various psychiatric disorders. Recent research has suggested that the control processes mediating switching can be subject to learning, because "switch readiness" can become associated with, and primed by, specific stimuli. In cued task swit...

Cognitive control refers to the use of internal goals to guide how we process stimuli, and control can be applied proactively (in anticipation of a stimulus) or reactively (once that stimulus has been presented). The application of control can be guided by memory; for instance, people typically learn to adjust their level of attentional selectivity...

Recent research suggests that people can learn to link the control process of task switching to predictive cues so that switch costs are attenuated following informative precues of switch likelihood. However, the precise conditions that shape such contextual cuing of control are not well understood. Farooqui and Manly (2015) raised the possibility...

Working memory (WM) needs to protect current content from interference and simultaneously be amenable to rapid updating with newly relevant information. An influential model suggests these opposing requirements are met via a basal ganglia (BG) - thalamus gating mechanism that allows for selective updating of prefrontal cortex (PFC) WM representatio...

The repeated pairing of a particular stimulus with a specific cognitive control process, such as task switching, can bind the two together in memory, resulting in the formation of stimulus-control associations. These bindings are thought to guide the context-sensitive application of cognitive control, but it is not presently known whether such stim...

Individuals are able to adjust their readiness to shift spatial attention, referred to as “attentional flexibility,” according to the changing demands of the environment, but the neural mechanisms underlying learned adjustments in flexibility are unknown. In the current study, we used fMRI to identify the brain structures responsible for learning s...

At present, the process of switching attention between external stimuli and internal representations is not well understood. To address this, Verschooren and colleagues (2019) recently designed a novel paradigm where participants were cued to switch attention between external and internal information on a trial-by-trial basis. The authors observed...

Executive function, or cognitive control, describes the ability to guide information processing in line with internal goals, but the nature of-and relationship between-the component processes supporting this ability remains poorly understood. Two key components of cognitive control are thought to be the regulation of the declarative contents of wor...

Humans are characterized by their ability to leverage rules for classifying and linking stimuli to context-appropriate actions. Previous studies have shown that when humans learn stimulus-response associations for two-dimensional stimuli, they implicitly form and generalize hierarchical rule structures (task-sets). However, the cognitive processes...

Critical real-life choices involve making complex decisions in the presence of potential threats, for instance, in medical or military emergencies. Effective choices require a decision maker to efficiently weigh and combine multiple sources of uncertain information. As anxiety can disrupt cognitive performance, complex decision-making under uncerta...

Adaptive behavior requires finding, and adjusting, an optimal tradeoff between focusing on a current task-set (cognitive stability) and updating that task-set when the environment changes (cognitive flexibility). Such dynamic adjustments of cognitive flexibility are observed in cued task-switching paradigms, where switch costs tend to decrease as t...

Individuals with anorexia nervosa (AN) often present inflexible behaviors and rigid thinking styles, which may contribute to disorder maintenance. Studies of set shifting have documented impairments in AN, but results have varied across samples. Moreover, the hypothesis that deficient set shifting may constitute an endophenotype rests largely on ob...

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...

Humans typically make near-optimal sensorimotor judgements but show systematic biases when making more cognitive judgements. Here we test the hypothesis that, while humans are sensitive to the noise present during early sensory encoding, the “optimality gap” arises because they are blind to noise introduced by later cognitive integration of variabl...

The contents of working memory (WM) guide visual attention toward matching features, with visual search being faster when the target and a feature of an item held in WM spatially overlap (validly cued) than when they occur at different locations (invalidly cued). Recent behavioral studies have indicated that attentional capture by WM content can be...

“Cognitive control” describes our ability to strategically bias information processing in line with internal goals. Traditionally, research has focused on delineating the sources of top-down biasing, implicating the lateral prefrontal cortex. The past two decades, however, have seen increasing interest in the regulation of control, that is, how lea...

Cognitive control refers to the use of internal goals to guide how we process stimuli, and control can be applied proactively (in anticipation of a stimulus) or reactively (once that stimulus has been presented). The application of control can be guided by memory; for instance, people typically learn to adjust their level of attentional selectivity...

Decisions often involve the consideration of multiple cues, each of which may inform selection on the basis of learned probabilities. Our ability to use probabilistic inference for decisions is bounded by uncertainty and constraints such as time pressure. Previous work showed that when humans choose between visual objects in a multiple-cue, probabi...

People preferentially attend to external stimuli that are related to themselves compared with others. Whether a similar self-reference bias applies to internal representations, such as those maintained in working memory (WM), is presently unknown. We tested this possibility in four experiments, in which participants were first trained to associate...

Recent studies have demonstrated that keeping an instructed task set in working memory (WM) for prospective use can interfere with behavior on an intervening task that employs shared stimuli-the prospective task-set-interference effect. One open question is whether people have strategic control over prospective task-set interference based on their...

Cognitive control proactively configures information processing to suit expected task demands. Predictions of forthcoming demand can be driven by explicit external cues or be generated internally, based on past experience (cognitive history). However, it is not known whether and how the brain reconciles these two sources of information to guide con...

Humans typically make near-optimal sensorimotor judgments but show systematic biases when making more cognitive judgments. Here we test the hypothesis that, while humans are sensitive to the noise present during early sensory processing, the “optimality gap” arises because they are blind to noise introduced by later cognitive integration of variabl...

Adaptive behavior is facilitated by our ability to discover and leverage rules for classifying and linking stimuli to appropriate actions. Previous studies have shown that when humans learn stimulus-response associations for two-dimensional stimuli, they implicitly form and generalize abstract rule structures. However, how such structure building a...

The perceptual load theory of attentional selection argues that the degree to which distractors interfere with target processing is determined by the "perceptual load" (or discrimination difficulty) of target processing: when perceptual load is low, distractors interfere to a greater extent than when it is high. A well-known exception is load-indep...

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...

Cognitive control proactively configures information processing to suit expected task demands. Predictions of forthcoming demand can be driven by explicit external cues or be generated internally, based on past experience (cognitive history). However, it is not known whether and how the brain reconciles these two sources of information to guide con...

Although cognitive control has traditionally been viewed in opposition to associative learning, recent studies show that people can learn to link particular stimuli with specific cognitive control states (e.g., high attentional selectivity). Here, we tested whether such learned stimulus-control associations can transfer across paired-associates. In...

The lateral prefrontal cortex (LPFC) plays a central role in the prioritization of sensory input based on task relevance. Such top-down control of perception is of fundamental importance in goal-directed behavior, but can also be costly when deployed excessively, necessitating a mechanism that regulates control engagement to align it with changing...

Recent studies have demonstrated that maintaining task-sets in working memory (WM) for prospective implementation can interfere with performance on an intervening task when the same stimulus requires incompatible responses in the ongoing versus the prospective task. This prospective task-set interference effect has previously been conceptualized as...

Cognitive flexibility forms the core of the extraordinary ability of humans to adapt, but the precise neural mechanisms underlying our ability to nimbly shift between task sets remain poorly understood. Recent functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) studies employing multivoxel pattern analysis (MVPA) have shown that a currently relevant task...

Real-life decision-making often involves combining multiple probabilistic sources of information under finite time and cognitive resources. To mitigate these pressures, people "satisfice", foregoing a full evaluation of all available evidence to focus on a subset of cues that allow for fast and "good-enough" decisions. Although this form of decisio...

Recent theories assert that visual working memory (WM) relies on the same attentional resources and sensory substrates as visual attention to external stimuli. Behavioral studies have observed competitive tradeoffs between internal (i.e., WM) and external (i.e., visual) attentional demands, and neuroimaging studies have revealed representations of...

Adaptive behavior requires context-sensitive configuration of task-sets that specify time-varying stimulus-response mappings. Intriguingly, response time costs associated with changing task-sets and motor responses areknownto be strongly interactive: switch costs at the task level are small in the presence of a response-switch but large when accomp...

The rich behavioral repertoire of the human species derives from our ability to flexibly reconfigure processing strategies (task sets) in response to changing requirements. This updating of task sets is effortful, as reflected by longer response times when switching a task than repeating it (switch costs). However, some recent data suggest that swi...