The Many Faces of Learning-Guided Cognitive Control

Abstract

Cognitive control refers to processes that enable adaptive, goaldirected behavior. Once ascribed to smart agents that willfully biased behavior in a top-down fashion (Norman & Shallice, 1986), an emerging “learning perspective” embodies the view that associative learning and memory processes are central to control (for recent reviews, see Abrahamse et al., 2016; Braem & Egner, 2018; Chiu & Egner, 2019; Egner, 2014). 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 form of incremental learning of the contextual likelihood of control demands (e.g., the accumulating realization that the current block of trials seems to be of high difficulty), and/or by associating specific stimuli or “events” with specific control demands, which can subsequently be retrieved in response to those stimuli/events. However, depending on context, adaptive control and the processes of learning and memory can also be at odds with one another. The studies in this special issue tackle three key themes surrounding learning-control interactions.