On How to Be Flexible (or Not): Modulation of the Stability-Flexibility Balance

TLDR

Goal‑directed behavior requires a dynamic balance between stability, which preserves goals, and flexibility, which allows rapid updating, and dysregulation of this balance can produce overly rigid or distractible behavior. The article reviews evidence on how positive affect, reward prospect, and task context modulate the stability‑flexibility balance. Two mechanisms are discussed: lowering the working‑memory updating threshold, which generally increases flexibility, and maintaining multiple tasks active, which increases flexibility only between those tasks.

Abstract

Goal-directed behavior in a constantly changing environment requires a dynamic balance between two antagonistic modes of control: On the one hand, goals need to be maintained and shielded from distraction (stability), and on the other hand, goals need to be relaxed and flexibly updated whenever significant changes occur (flexibility). A dysregulation of this stability-flexibility balance can result in overly rigid or overly distractible behavior, and it is therefore important to understand how this balance is regulated in a context-sensitive, adaptive manner. In the present article, we review recent evidence on how positive affect, reward prospect, and task context modulate the stability-flexibility balance. Two distinct underlying cognitive mechanisms will be discussed: Flexibility may result either from lowering the updating threshold in working memory or from keeping multiple tasks active in working memory. Critically, these two mechanisms allow different (testable) predictions: Whereas lowering the updating threshold should ease the access of new information in working memory and thereby increase flexibility in general, concurrent task activation should only increase flexibility between the respective tasks.