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Related Experiment Video

Updated: Jan 19, 2026

The Attentional Set Shifting Task: A Measure of Cognitive Flexibility in Mice
09:15

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Attentional prioritization reconfigures novel instructions into action-oriented task sets.

Carlos González-García1, Silvia Formica1, Baptist Liefooghe2

  • 1Department of Experimental Psychology, Ghent University, Belgium.

Cognition
|September 13, 2019
PubMed
Summary

Human cognitive flexibility allows us to act on new instructions. Selective attention helps reformat these instructions into action plans for efficient task execution.

Keywords:
Cognitive controlInstructionsRetro-cuesSelective attention

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Area of Science:

  • Cognitive Neuroscience
  • Human Psychology

Background:

  • Human cognitive flexibility enables efficient conversion of symbolic instructions into novel behaviors.
  • Rapid transformation of instruction content into action plans is crucial for reflexive task execution.
  • Mechanisms underlying this instruction-to-action transformation remain largely unknown.

Purpose of the Study:

  • To investigate the role of selective attention in reformatting working memory content into action-oriented representations.
  • To test the hypothesis that selective attention prioritizes novel instructions for behavioral implementation.

Main Methods:

  • A paradigm involving encoding of stimulus-response (S-R) mappings followed by retro-cue selection of specific mappings.
  • Two preregistered experiments were conducted to assess the impact of cued vs. uncued mappings on task performance.
  • Behavioral measures were used to infer the formation of action-oriented states.

Main Results:

  • Participants demonstrated benefits from retro-cues during novel task-set implementation.
  • Cued mappings, but not uncued ones, elicited intention-based reflexivity.
  • This suggests that only attended instructions were converted into an action-oriented state.

Conclusions:

  • Selective attention plays a critical role in prioritizing relevant instructed content.
  • This prioritization facilitates the prospective reformatting of instructions into action-bound task sets.
  • The findings shed light on the cognitive mechanisms underlying flexible behavioral control.