ArticleNature human behaviour2025
Distractor-specific control adaptation in multidimensional environments.
Article in Nature human behaviour, 2025. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 3 papers.
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Who cites it
3 citing papers in PubMed.
- Ten years Diffusion Model for Conflict (DMC) tasks: Theoretical foundations, applications, practical recommendations, and open challenges.Psychonomic bulletin & review · 2026Review
- Understanding mechanisms of voluntary engagement of mental effort using active inference.Cognitive, affective & behavioral neuroscience · 2026Article
- Congruency effects can interact even when controlling for the reactivation aversion effect: implications for the generality-specificity paradox in hybrid distractor-interference tasks.Psychological research · 2025Article
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Authors and funding
2 authors.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
Goal-directed behaviour requires humans to constantly manage and switch between multiple, independent and conflicting sources of information. Conventional cognitive control tasks, however, only feature one task and one source of distraction. Therefore, it is unclear how control is allocated in multidimensional environments. To address this question, we developed a multidimensional task-set interference paradigm, in which people need to manage distraction from three independent dimensions. We use this task to test whether people adapt to previous conflict by enhancing task-relevant information or suppressing task-irrelevant information. Three experiments provided strong evidence for the latter hypothesis. Moreover, control adaptation was highly dimension specific. Conflict from a given dimension only affected processing of that same dimension on subsequent trials, with no evidence for generalization. A new neural network model shows that our results can only be simulated when including multiple independent conflict-detector units. Our results call for an update to classic models of cognitive control and their neurocomputational underpinnings.
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Registered trials
Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.