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No convincing evidence for the independence of persistence and flexibility

Nature Reviews Psychology volume 3, page 638 (2024)Cite this article

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Classical approaches to human action control have concentrated on an agent’s ability to maintain focus on a goal or task, ignore irrelevant information, and overcome obstacles — a feat often characterized as ‘stability’ or ‘persistence’. However, truly adaptive action control requires agents to properly balance persistence and flexibility (metacontrol1), which consists of considering alternative goals or tasks, finding novel or out-of-the-box solutions, and screening nominally irrelevant information for interesting opportunities. We and others2,3,4,5 have considered persistence and flexibility as poles of a common dimension, which implies a trade-off between the two. Egner claims that this view is incorrect and presents several kinds of ‘dissociations’, which he takes to demonstrate that persistence and flexibility are independent (Egner, T. Principles of cognitive control over task focus and task switching. Nat. Rev. Psychol. 2, 702–714; 2023)6. However, closer scrutiny reveals that this claim of independence is unfounded.

First, Egner equates persistence and flexibility with performance in task-focusing and task-switching, respectively. However, both focusing and switching performance are known to be affected by numerous factors, often unrelated to persistence and flexibility. Thus, performance on these tasks hardly counts as process-pure equivalents of persistence and flexibility. For instance, performance in the Stroop task and other conflict tasks that Egner equates with persistence is only weakly related to cognitive control7 and is factor-analytically inseparable from switching8.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. School of Psychology, Shandong Normal University, Jinan, China

    Bernhard Hommel, Lorenza Colzato & Christian Beste

  2. Cognitive Neurophysiology, Department of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry, Faculty of Medicine, TU Dresden, Dresden, Germany

    Lorenza Colzato & Christian Beste

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  1. Bernhard Hommel
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Correspondence to Bernhard Hommel.

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Hommel, B., Colzato, L. & Beste, C. No convincing evidence for the independence of persistence and flexibility. Nat Rev Psychol 3, 638 (2024). https://doi.org/10.1038/s44159-024-00353-6

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