Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

Constraints on control-dependent processing have become afundamental concept in general theories of cognition that ex-plain human behavior in terms of rational adaptations to theseconstraints. However, theories miss a rationale for why suchconstraints would exist in the first place. Recent work suggeststhat constraints on the allocation of control facilitate flexibletask switching at the expense of the stability needed to supportgoal-directed behavior in face of distraction. Here, we formu-late this problem in a dynamical system, in which control sig-nals are represented as attractors and in which constraints oncontrol allocation limit the depth of these attractors. We deriveformal expressions of the stability-flexibility tradeoff, showingthat constraints on control allocation improve cognitive flexi-bility but impair cognitive stability. Finally, we provide evi-dence that human participants adapt higher constraints on theallocation of control as the demand for flexibility increases butthat participants deviate from optimal constraints.