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Independent Regulation of Cognitive Stability and Flexibility in Visual Search

Poster Session F - Tuesday, March 10, 2026, 8:00 – 10:00 am PDT, Fairview/Kitsilano Ballroom

Changrun Huang¹ (), Tobias Egner¹; ¹Duke University

Research on cognitive control and visual search has progressed largely in parallel, despite the shared underlying focus on controlled attention. The current study aimed to bridge this gap by testing whether a recent key finding in cued task-switching —the observation of independence rather than a trade-off between cognitive stability and flexibility— would generalize to the domain of visual search. We developed a novel cued singleton search task where a central cue instructed participants to locate either a size or a luminance singleton feature while ignoring the alternate singleton feature, which could either overlap with the target singleton (congruent trials) or not (incongruent trials). This allowed us to simultaneously measure cognitive stability (singleton congruency effect) and flexibility (target-switch cost). In a within-subjects factorial design, we orthogonally manipulated the block-wise proportions of incongruent trials (25% vs. 75%) and switch trials (25% vs. 75%) to independently vary the contextual demands on each function. These manipulations produced a clear double dissociation in behavior: The proportion of incongruent trials selectively modulated the congruency effect (260 ms vs. 113 ms) without affecting the switch cost. Conversely, the proportion of switch trials selectively modulated the switch cost (121 ms vs. 61 ms) without affecting the congruency effect. These results provide strong evidence against an obligatory stability-flexibility trade-off in visual attention. Instead, these data suggest that the independent regulation of stability and flexibility may be a general principle of controlled attention, thus providing an empirical link between cued task switching and visual search.

Topic Area: EXECUTIVE PROCESSES: Goal maintenance & switching