The social transmission of metacontrol policies: Mechanisms underlying the interpersonal transfer of persistence and flexibility.

People often face trade-offs between sticking with a strategy (persistence) and switching to a new one (flexibility), a dilemma requiring metacontrol—the regulation of which cognitive-control policy to use. Individual differences in metacontrol biases toward persistence or flexibility show up in specially designed tasks and correlate with genetic variations in dopamine systems and with whether a person comes from an individualistic or collectivistic culture. Yet mood and meditation also shift these biases: negative mood and focused-attention meditation favor persistence, while positive mood and open-monitoring meditation favor flexibility. Thus genetic and cultural factors do not fully determine metacontrol; a proposed framework explains how they set defaults that situational factors can override.

Study at a glance

Abstract

Humans often face binary cognitive-control dilemmas, with the choice between persistence and flexibility being a crucial one. Tackling these dilemmas requires metacontrol, i.e., the control of the current cognitive-control policy. As predicted from functional, psychometric, neuroscientific, and modeling approaches, interindividual variability in metacontrol biases towards persistence or flexibility could be demonstrated in metacontrol-sensitive tasks. These biases covary systematically with genetic predispositions regarding mesofrontal and nigrostriatal dopaminergic functioning and the individualistic or collectivistic nature of the cultural background. However, there is also evidence for mood- and meditation-induced intraindividual variability (with negative mood and focused-attention meditation being associated with a bias towards persistence, and positive mood and open-monitoring meditation being associated with a bias towards flexibility), suggesting that genetic and cultural factors do not determine metacontrol settings entirely. We suggest a theoretical framework that explains how genetic predisposition and cultural learning can lead to the implementation of metacontrol defaults, which however can be shifted towards persistence or flexibility by situational factors.