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Reply to ‘No convincing evidence for the independence of persistence and flexibility’

Nature Reviews Psychology volume 3, page 639 (2024)Cite this article

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In an article published last year, I argued that many empirical data points violate the commonly assumed tradeoff between cognitive stability and flexibility, and that these constructs should therefore be reconceived as two independent dimensions (Egner, T. Principles of cognitive control over task focus and task switching. Nat. Rev. Psychol. 2, 702–714; 2023)1. Hommel, Colzato, and Beste (Hommel, B., Colzato, L. & Beste, C. No convincing evidence for the independence of persistence and flexibility. Nat. Rev. Psychol. https://doi.org/10.1038/s44159-024-00353-6; 2024)2 reject this proposal in favour of a traditional view in which stability and flexibility represent opposing poles on a single dimension, the stability–flexibility continuum3,4.

Hommel and colleagues make four arguments against my proposal. First, they note that many of the dissociations between stability and flexibility that I cited stem from conflict and task-switching studies1, which they claim supply ‘impure’ measures of these constructs. I counter that although conflict and switch tasks are not process-pure, they have high face validity (and are the most commonly used paradigms) for probing the constructs of stability and flexibility, respectively. Crucially, proponents of the stability–flexibility continuum have based much of their own theorizing on data from these same paradigms3,4,5. Data from these tasks cannot be treated as valid when one’s theoretical assumptions are confirmed but ‘impure’ when they are not. Finally, behavioural data that are incompatible with a unidimensional view stem from a wider range of tasks than just conflict and task-switching protocols6.

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References

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  1. Department of Psychology & Neuroscience, Duke University, Durham, NC, USA

    Tobias Egner

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  1. Tobias Egner
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Correspondence to Tobias Egner.

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Egner, T. Reply to ‘No convincing evidence for the independence of persistence and flexibility’. Nat Rev Psychol 3, 639 (2024). https://doi.org/10.1038/s44159-024-00354-5

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