Sui benefici dell'eterogeneità nella stabilità e flessibilità cognitiva in ambienti di task switching collaborativo ​

Environments pose antagonistic demands on individual and collective cognition, such as trading off cognitive stability against cognitive flexibility. Manifestations of this trade off have been shown to vary across individuals, leading to differences in individual task switching performance. In this simulation study, we examine how individual differences in cognitive stability and flexibility contribute to collective task switching performance. Specifically, we study whether diversity in cognitive stability and flexibility among members of a group can facilitate collaborative task switching. We test this hypothesis by probing task switching performance of a multi-agent dynamical system, and by varying the heterogeneity of cognitive stability and flexibility among agents. We conduct thousands of numerical simulations in a two-task switching environment, comparing the performance of homogeneous groups with shared cognitive traits to heterogeneous groups. We find that heterogeneous groups can outperform homogeneous ones, particularly in scenarios characterized by a high task switching rate and limited external instructions for task switching. Critically, we find that in these cases the benefits of heterogeneous groups arise from particular configurations of groups in which flexible agents receive the task switch cues. We finally discuss the implications of these findings for normative accounts of cognitive heterogeneity, as well as clinical, corporate team work and educational settings. ​