When the same patterns repeat across days, a different process takes over. With multiday practice, people build a mental model of how often rules tend to change and begin using that model to guide their control settings. This study shows the shift from reactive responding to a learned expectation that steers when and how fast someone updates task rules. Learning unfolds gradually; people refine their strategies as they accumulate experience, not overnight but across repeated sessions.
These findings matter for designing training, classrooms, and workplaces where shifting tasks are common. If the goal is to foster stable, adaptive control, short exposures will nudge immediate behavior, while sustained practice reshapes how people anticipate volatility. Follow the full article to see how those changes were measured and what that means for helping people develop more flexible, inclusive ways of working and learning.
Abstract
People adjust how fast they update task rules, depending on the volatility of their environment, by regulating cognitive control accordingly. We investigated whether this adaptation is primarily driven by recently experienced volatility in task demands, or can also be shaped by learned environmental knowledge indicating expected levels of volatility. To this end, we trained participants on a Wisconsin Card Sorting Test task where different environments required different speeds of task rule updating. We demonstrate that, initially, participants adopted task rule updating strategies depending on the most recently experienced levels of volatility and feedback (Experiment 1). However, after extensive (4 days) training (Experiment 2), participants updated task rules using strategies based on developed environmental knowledge. We also show how participants fine-tuned their task rule updating strategies over learning. In sum, our findings provide important insights into how humans update task rules using different strategies and highlight the importance of multiday training in developing environmental knowledge for the regulation of cognitive control.
