Switching Between Cognitive Control States? No, Thank You.

Cognitive control enables adaptive behavior by flexibly adjusting information processing to meet changing environmental demands. While extensive research has examined the costs of switching between different tasks, it remains unclear whether switching between different control states (relaxed and focused) within a single task carries intrinsic costs. We hypothesized that internally switching between control states while performing a single task incurs a subjective effort cost and, therefore, that people avoid such demands. Additionally, we examined the tradeoff between this cost and an established demand source—interference. We conducted a series of experiments using the Demand Selection Task, where participants chose between different options that yielded lists of Stroop trials. Participants consistently avoided options with high demands for internal state switching (Experiment 1, N = 64) or interference (Experiment 2, N = 86). Regarding the potential tradeoff, Experiment 3 (N = 120) tested whether internal state-switching demands modulate interference costs when both are present, but did not provide evidence for this modulation. However, due to constraints imposed by the structure of the Stroop task, simultaneous manipulation of switching and interference was only possible with relatively weak manipulations for both. To address this, we developed a novel parametric flanker task (Experiment 4, N = 50) that enables strong simultaneous manipulation of both demands. With these stronger manipulations, both switching and interference costs influenced selections, revealing trade-offs between these competing demands (Experiment 5, N = 130). Our findings refine models of control regulation, highlighting that not only exerting but also adjusting control carries intrinsic costs.