Balancing Cognitive Flexibility and Stability: The Role of Reward, Autism, and Transdiagnostic Traits

In our daily lives, we often need to switch between states of cognitive flexibility and stability based on environmental demands. It has been suggested that people can learn to navigate this balance based on reinforcement, but that this may be impaired in autism or other transdiagnostic dimensions. Replicating previous work, we show that people (n = 412) voluntarily switch tasks more when previously rewarded more for performing well on task-switch trials. Interestingly, we also found that it was difficult to unlearn this shift in cognitive flexibility when the mapping between task-switching and reward suddenly reversed. People with an autism diagnosis or high autism traits were not slower or faster in learning these contingencies. However, our results suggested a generally smaller task-rule interference effect and larger switch costs in autism and high autism traits, in line with prevalent ideas that they show more cognitive stability at the cost of less flexibility. A similar pattern was found for a significantly correlated Compulsivity and intrusive thought not capitalised for consistency please and Alexithymia component extracted from a rotated principal component analysis, highlighting the need to consider co-occurring symptoms. Together, our findings show that people learn to vary task-switching behaviour as a function of reinforcement, which may be hard or slow to unlearn, as well as interindividual variations along the flexibility-stability trade-off that show a relation to autism.