It is widely assumed that individuals are more driven to avoid losses than to gain rewards. Yet, this assumption has not been explicitly tested in commonly used cognitive tasks. Here, we compared the influence of both incentives on performance in the Stroop task, in which fast and correct responses resulted in increased rewards or reduced losses. No-incentive trials served as control condition. If losses indeed have a higher subjective weight than equivalent rewards, performance should be improved most by the prospect of loss reduction. Although both incentives clearly improved performance as compared with no-incentive trials across three experiments, we observed no significant advantage of loss compared with reward trials. Rather, our data points in the opposite direction, with overall significantly slower responses in loss compared with reward trials, which may reflect a conflict between an inherent avoidance tendency and the required immediate response. Overall, these findings suggest that losses are not more, but slightly less effective than rewards in improving performance in this cognitive task. Since our data does not support the notion of an asymmetry under which avoided losses are more effective than equivalent rewards to improve performance in a prototypical cognitive control task, both incentives should be fully matched to provide a fair comparison in such task contexts.

Environmental stimuli can provoke specific response tendencies depending on their incentive valence. While some studies report positive-approach and negative-avoidance biases, others find no such mappings. To further illuminate the relationship between incentive valence and action requirement, we combined a cued monetary incentive paradigm with an approach/avoidance joystick task. Incentive type was manipulated between groups: The reward group won money, while the punishment group avoided losing money for correct and fast responses to targets following incentive cues. Depending on their orientations, targets had to be 'approached' or 'avoided'. Importantly, incentive valence (signaled by cue color) was orthogonal to action requirement (target orientation). Moreover, targets could carry valence-associated information or not (target color), which was, however, task-irrelevant. First, we observed that both valence cues (reward/punishment) improved performance compared to neutral cues, independent of the required action (approach/avoid), suggesting that advance valence cues do not necessarily produce specific action biases. Second, task-irrelevant valence associations with targets promoted action biases, with valence-associated targets facilitating approach and impairing avoid responses. Importantly, this approach bias for valence-associated targets was observed in both groups and hence occurred independently of absolute valence ('unsigned'). This rather unexpected finding might be related to the absence of a direct contrast between positive valence and negative valence within groups and the common goal to respond fast and accurately in all incentive trials. Together, our results seem to challenge the notion that monetary incentives trigger 'hard-wired' valence-action biases in that specific design choices seem to modulate the presence and/or direction of valence-action biases.

Influential theories of dorsal anterior cingulate cortex (dACC) function suggest that the dACC registers cognitive conflict as an aversive signal, but no study directly tested this idea. In this preregistered human fMRI study, we used multivariate pattern analyses to identify which regions respond similarly to conflict and aversive signals. The results show that, of all conflict-and value-related regions, only the dACC/pre-SMA showed shared representations, directly supporting recent dACC theories.

Although behavioural rigidity belongs to the core symptoms of autism spectrum conditions, little is known about its underlying cognitive mechanisms. The current study investigated the role of intentional control mechanisms in behavioural rigidity in autism. Autistic individuals and their matched controls were instructed to repeatedly choose between two simple cognitive tasks and to respond accordingly to the subsequently presented stimulus. Results showed that autistic participants chose to repeat tasks more often than their controls and when choosing to switch, they demonstrated larger performance costs. These findings illustrate that when required to make their own choices, autistic people demonstrate rigidity at different performance levels, suggesting that intentional control mechanisms might be important for a better understanding of behavioural rigidity in autism.

One of the main symptoms of Autism Spectrum Conditions (ASC) is experiencing cognitive inflexibility when adjustments of behaviour are required. While this so-called behavioural rigidity is broadly recognised in ASC, finding evidence for the underlying neurocognitive mechanisms remains challenging. In this electroencephalographic (EEG) study, participants with ASC and matched controls were instructed to choose between two cognitive tasks in each trial, and to respond to the subsequently presented target stimulus according to their task choice. While doing so, we tracked the frontally distributed contingent negative variation (CNV) during the task preparation interval as a measure of intentional control, and the posteriorly measured P3 during the task execution interval to monitor the translation of intentions into actions. The results support the notion of intentional control difficulties in ASC, where the CNV was attenuated in the ASC group compared to the control group. Furthermore, the CNV was differentiated between the tasks and transition types in the control group only, suggesting that the ASC group was less fine-tuning the required amount of intentional control to contextual circumstances. In contrast, the P3 showed no significant differences between the groups. Together, these findings highlight the importance of intentional control mechanisms as a crucial future route for a better understanding of cognitive flexibility and behavioural rigidity in ASC.