Positive mood appears to make us flexible but also susceptible to distractions 1•, 2, 3. Maintaining openness to multiple tasks comes at the cost of efficient performance within each individual activity [4]. And certain neurological or psychiatric disorder may represent opposite extremes of a dimension ranging from either highly perseverative to unconstrained patterns of thought or action (e.g. Parkinson’s disease vs positive symptoms in Schizophrenia 5, 6, 7, 8•, 9).

These and related phenomena are often understood as manifestations of a fundamental stability–flexibility dilemma 10, 11•, 12•, an idea that initially arose from attempts to model cognitive control problems through simple connectionist networks 4••, 11•, 13, 14, 15. In such networks, the activation pattern across nodes creates an ‘attractor landscape’ that allows either stable attractor states that resist interference or flexibility at the cost of increased interference (see Figure 1a). Furthermore, if our cognitive system can be either flexible or stable, but not both [4], it needs strategies for biasing itself in a context-adequate manner in either direction — a type of regulation that is now often referred to as ‘meta-control’ 16, 17.

The stability/flexibility tradeoff idea is attractive because of its potential, theoretical, and pragmatic reach: It has been used to explain phenomena from trial-to-trial information processing dynamics [13] to the effects of mood on cognitive control or how cultures might shape cognition [18]. Yet, while the underlying attractor landscape model provides a causal explanation for potential tradeoffs, it comes with no specification or constraints regarding the generality of tradeoff phenomena. In principle, tradeoffs could arise either in a highly representation-specific or a ‘system-wide’ manner (Figure 1a), and as result from experimental manipulations, as well as from within-individual or between-individual, natural variations cognitive control (see Figure 3). Therefore, we focus here on evidence from the task-switching paradigm 19, 20 as a model situation for probing the generality of tradeoff patterns (Figure 3 [21]).