Forschungsprojekt ::

Verbal and non-verbal control settings in action control: Configuring the cognitive system for present and future task performance

Projektbeschreibung

Cognitive control ensures our successful achievement of goals. Models of action control assume automatic as well as controlled processes to ensure successful completion of goal-directed actions. These two modes of action control differ in the use of language and associative learning. Next to differential involvement of control processes in actual task performance, the two control settings under investigation in this project, namely verbal and non-verbal ones, are assumed to lead to differential learning and expertise. Verbal control settings are control settings relying on language, comprising processes such as self-instruction and rather abstract, symbolic representations. In contrast, non-verbal control settings make use of formerly learnt associations and lead to the formation of episodic memory traces. Cognitive control processes and their flexible adaption to situational constraints have been studied using the task-switching paradigm, for example. In a task-switching situation, people encounter at least two tasks and are asked to alternate between them as indicated by valid task cue next to other tasks, such as the Stroop task. In a first series of experiments, we will investigate how situational characteristics such as task, cues and stimuli lead participants to adopt one or the other control setting in a current situation. Moreover, we are interested in how different control settings lead to differential learning to achieve expertise/skills. We expect that verbal control settings lead to faster learning, but also less flexibility in case of a goal change. Non-verbal control settings, on the other hand will take longer to achieve automatization, yet might lead to larger congruency effects exploiting seemingly irrelevant information. In a second series of experiments, we plan to identify the neural underpinnings of verbal and non-verbal control settings using event-related potentials (ERPs). Furthermore, the impact of semantic relatedness between cues and tasks on task performance will investigated. In series 3, we will investigate how individual differences in intelligence, working memory capacity and self-directed speech affect the choice of verbal and non-verbal control settings. This series will investigate the choice of control settings to solve cognitive tasks (i.e., Stroop or Flanker) as an individual difference next to contextual triggers. In the final series we will investigate the impact of lifelong training by testing bilingual and monolingual participants. We assume that the constant need to manage two languages leads bilinguals to adopt the verbal control mode constantly and therefore one qualifying condition of bilingualism might be a reduced flexibility in the adaption of control settings because of the dominance of verbal control settings. In sum, we suggest four series of experiments to broaden our understanding of the flexibility of cognitive control and its modulating conditions and the achieved skill formation.