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Poster Session A: Tuesday, August 12, 1:30 – 4:30 pm, de Brug & E‑Hall

Leveraging Multi-task Structure for Cognitive Flexibility

Xiaoyu K Zhang¹, Mehdi Senoussi², Tom Verguts¹; ¹Universiteit Gent, ²Université Toulouse Jean Jaurès (Toulouse II)

Presenter: Xiaoyu K Zhang

Cognitive flexibility requires both retaining past knowledge (stability) and generalizing to new tasks. While attention mechanisms supporting this tradeoff have been studied, the complementary role of environmental structure—richness and specifically connectivity—remains underexplored. We systematically examine how these factors affect performance in MLPs and in attention-based models. Our results show that richer, more connected environments enhance both generalization and stability, especially for attention models, highlighting the importance of architecture–environment interactions in multitask learning.

Topic Area: Predictive Processing & Cognitive Control

Extended Abstract: Full Text PDF