Abstract
Cognitive flexibility is the ability to switch between different concepts or to adapt goal-directed behavior in a changing environment. Although, cognitive research on this ability has long been focused on the individual mind, it is becoming increasingly clear that cognitive flexibility plays a central role in our social life. This is particularly evident in turn-taking in verbal conversation, where cognitive flexibility of the individual becomes part of social flexibility in the dyadic interaction. In this work, we introduce a model that reveals different parameters that explain how people flexibly handle unexpected events in verbal conversation. In order to study hypotheses derived from the model, we use a novel experimental approach in which thirty pairs of participants engaged in a word-by-word interaction by taking turns in generating sentences word by word. Similar to well established individual cognitive tasks, participants needed to adapt their behavior in order to respond to their co-actor's last utterance. With our experimental approach we could manipulate the interaction between participants: Either both participants had to construct a sentence with a common target word (congruent condition) or with distinct target words (incongruent condition). We further studied the relation between the interactive Word-by-Word task measures and classical individual-centered, cognitive tasks, namely the Number-Letter task, the Stop-Signal task, and the GoNogo task. In the Word-by-Word task, we found that participants had faster response times in congruent compared to incongruent trials, which replicates the primary findings of standard cognitive tasks measuring cognitive flexibility. Further, we found a significant correlation between the performance in the Word-by-Word task and the Stop-Signal task indicating that participants with a high cognitive flexibility in the Word-by-Word task also showed high inhibition control.
Highlights
The flexibility to adapt to a human counterpart lies at the heart of human social interaction
We first tested whether participants had more difficulties to build sentences in the incongruent condition compared to the congruent condition (H1) and whether this effect was modulated by the participants’ ability to see each other (H3)
We found a main effect for congruency, F(1,58) = 63.90, p < .001, ηp2 = 0.524, yielding shorter mean turn-taking reaction time (TTRT) for congruent trials (M = 1.74 s, SE = 0.067 s) compared to incongruent trials (M = 1.99 s, SE = 0.062 s), no main effect for visibility, F(1,58) = 1.45, p = .23, and no interaction effect between both variables F(1,58) = 1.42 p =
Summary
The flexibility to adapt to a human counterpart lies at the heart of human social interaction. This is evident in conversation, where turn-taking happens fluently and both conversation partners respond and adapt flexibly to expected or less expected utterances by the counterpart. An approach to social flexibility downloaded at the open science framework at osf.
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