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To meet cognitive control demands of everyday life, we must continuously adapt our behavior, balancing cognitive stability and flexibility. According to the control-dilemma framework, stable goal-shielding and flexible goal-shifting control modes entail opposing performance costs and benefits. In a within-subjects design, we aim to induce both control modes by manipulating the frequency of task-switches in a cued task-switching paradigm. A high (75%) task-switch proportion of trial transitions in the shifting condition demands flexible shifting between tasks, whereas a lower proportion (25%) permits a more stable control mode within shielding blocks. In both conditions, we will intersperse identical short “diagnostic” test trial sequences with 50% taskswitches, assuming that the contextually induced control modes will persist during these test blocks. In line with the assumption of a performance cost-benefit trade-off between goalshielding and goal-shifting, we expect higher switch costs and reduced interference costs in the shielding condition, and vice versa in the shifting condition. At a neural level, we aim to obtain fMRI indicators to decode the underlying neural patterns of both control modes, investigating whether the respective states are reflected in more or less stable neural task representations (as indicated by enhanced or reduced decoding accuracy in shielding and shifting blocks, respectively). We predict that the shielding-shifting trade-off will show in the brain signals as more stable task representations and enhanced decoding accuracy in the shielding relative to the shifting condition. Moreover, we will assess whether more stable control modes are also reflected in more stable dynamic whole-brain functional connectivity patterns.

Everyday life confronts us with situations requiring us to flexibly shift between goals or to shield our intentions from distractions to varying degrees. Control dilemma theory posits that individuals adjust their balance between goal shielding and shifting dynamically to meet changing control demands. These different control modes are assumed to afford complementary performance benefits and costs. Despite growing interest in the mechanisms underlying cognitive control regulations, only few studies have directly tested this assumption and recent findings have even called into question the notion of an obligatory shielding-shifting trade-off (Geddert & Egner, 2022). The objectives of our study were to investigate whether such control adjustments are under volitional control, to test the assumption of a shielding-shifting trade-off, and to examine if the task relevance of distracting information moderates control mode adaptations. To this end, we used two task-switching paradigms differing in the informative content of distractors. In a within-subjects design, we instructed participants either to focus their attention on the current task (goal shielding) or to try to switch flexibly between tasks (goal shifting) to maximize their monetary reward. Participants adjusted their goal shifting according to the instruction, as indicated by reduced task-switch costs in the shifting condition. However, participants did not succeed in implementing the shielding instruction, i.e., participants’ performance was equally impaired by interfering information in both conditions. In line with the control dilemma theory, participants displayed the expected pattern of reciprocal performance benefits and costs. We further found no effect of distractor relevance on control mode adaptations.

Failures of self-control during conflicts between long-term goals and immediate desires are a key characteristic of many harmful behaviours, including unhealthy eating habits, lack of exercise and problematic substance use, which often have adverse personal consequences and incur great societal costs. The project aims to elucidate neurocognitive mechanisms mediating deficient self-control, both in daily self-control failures and in substance use disorders and behavioural addictions, which are characterized by a loss of control despite awareness of adverse consequences. We launched a prospective cohort study using a multi-level approach that combines (i) a comprehensive clinical assessment, (ii) behavioural task batteries assessing cognitive control and decision-making functions, (iii) task-related and resting state fMRI, and (iv) smartphone-based ecological momentary assessment of daily self-control failures. From a representative community sample, we recruited three groups of participants (n = 338; age 19 – 27 years) with (a) symptoms of non-substance related (n=118) and (b) substance-related addictive disorders (n=100) and (c) syndrome-free controls (n=120. Participants are invited to yearly clinical follow-up assessments and further multi-level assessments 3 and 6 years after initial recruitment. Results obtained so far (until 09/2021) provide converging evidence that task performance as well as brain activity in monitoring, control, and valuation networks is reliably associated with the propensity to commit real-life self-control failures. Results support a process model, according to which deficient performance-monitoring leads to an insufficient recruitment of control networks, which attenuates the impact of long-term goals on neural value signals and increases the likelihood of self-control failures. In the final funding period (until 06/2024), we will extend the clinical follow-up period to 7 years. In addition, we will assess stress markers as possible moderators of self-control. With our cross-lagged panel design we expect the project to make a substantial contribution to the central unresolved question whether dysfunctions of cognitive control are causally involved in the development and trajectories of self-control failures and addictive behaviours, as well as to the disputed question of communalities and differences between different addictive disorders. Thereby, we hope to contribute to mechanism-based models of self-control impairments as a foundation for improved prevention and therapy.

Please note that this is a detailed description of a part of the hypotheses from the project ‘Volitional Dysfunction in Self-control Failures and Addictive Behaviours’, which you can find on OSF at https://osf.io/rhjb4. As we have various hypotheses with complex operationalisations in this project, we planned to present separate analysis plans for each hypothesis. The separate analysis plans are and will be added to the main OSF project and numbered according to the hypotheses under section ‘4 Hypotheses’ in the main document ‘OSF Registration C1_23.09.21’.