To Stay or Not to Stay: The Stability-Flexibility Trade-Off in Value-Based Decision Making
In order to successfully pursue a goal, humans need to maintain their behavior in the face of distractions. However, to avoid pursuing goals that became undesirable, humans also need to adjust their behavior flexibly to respective changes in the environment. The trade-off between these two forms of human functioning, cognitive stability and cognitive flexibility, is often investigated in cognitive psychology in task shielding and task switching paradigms. Here, we show that cognitive stability and flexibility also play a role in value-based decision making, as indicated by choice perseveration. We combine two experimental manipulations typical for task switching/shielding paradigms, i.e., varying the inter-trial interval and the stimulus onset asynchrony, and implement them in the context of value-based decision making in a binary choice paradigm. We predict how these manipulations will affect choice perseveration using a computational attractor model. We then test these predictions in a value-based decision game in two experiments using a sequential manipulation. Our results show that both the inter-trial interval and the stimulus onset asynchrony modulate choice perseveration as predicted by the model. We discuss how our findings extend research on cognitive stability and flexibility and their underlying mechanisms by adapting it to the domain of decision making.