What is this collection about?

Cognitive flexibility is a fundamental aspect of cognition that enables the adaptive regulation of thoughts and behaviors in response to changing environments and new information. Broadly conceptualized as the capacity to adapt thoughts, behaviors, and internal models to changing demands, it encompasses processes such as flexible learning, exploration, creativity, curiosity, information seeking, and adaptive decision-making. Importantly, cognitive flexibility is not limited to reactive adaptation to external demands, but also supports generative, intrinsically motivated cognition, through which individuals actively generate possibilities, seek information and update their internal models.

Recent advances in neuroimaging, computational modeling, and systems neuroscience have provided important insights into the neural circuits and network dynamics that support cognitive flexibility. At the same time, there is growing interest in whether and how impairments in cognitive flexibility contribute to psychiatric and neurological disorders such as mood and anxiety disorders, schizophrenia, autism spectrum disorder, and neurodegenerative diseases.

In this Collection, we invite submissions that investigate the neural mechanisms underlying cognitive flexibility across multiple levels of analysis in health and disease. We welcome studies involving human participants and animal models, spanning cellular, circuit, systems, computational, and cognitive neuroscience approaches. Topics of interest include, but are not limited to, generative and open-ended cognition, cognitive control and task switching, flexible learning and adaptive decision-making, exploration-exploitation, curiosity and information seeking, creativity and open-ended problem solving, predictive coding and internal-model updating, and the neural and computational mechanisms supporting flexible cognition. Studies examining individual differences, development and aging, or alterations of these processes in psychiatric and neurological conditions are also welcome. The scope of this Collection does not include studies focused primarily on the molecular basis of cognitive flexibility.

Why submit to a collection?

Collections like this one help promote high-quality science. They are led by In-House Editors who are experts in their fields and supported by a dedicated team of Commissioning Editors and Managing Editors at Springer Nature. Collection manuscripts typically see higher citations, downloads, and Altmetric scores, and provide a one-stop-shop on a cutting-edge topic of interest.

This Collection welcomes submissions from all authors – and not by invitation only – on the condition that the manuscripts fall within the scope of the Collection and of Communications Biology more generally. See our editorial process page for more details. All manuscripts published in the collection are hosted on a dedicated nature portfolio portal, giving articles high visibility beyond the journal they are published in.

Who is involved?

Communications Biology is edited by both in-house professional editors and Editorial Board Members.

Guest Editors for Communications Biology

Zenas Chao, PhD, The University of Tokyo, Tokyo, Japan

Zenas C. Chao is an Associate Professor at the International Research Center for Neurointelligence (IRCN) at the University of Tokyo. He earned his PhD in Biomedical Engineering from the Georgia Institute of Technology. After graduation, he moved to Japan and held positions at the RIKEN Brain Science Institute (RIKEN-BSI), the National Institute for Physiological Sciences (NIPS), and Kyoto University. His research focuses on information coding in the nervous system across humans, non-human primates, rodents, neuronal cultures, and computational models. He is particularly interested in how neural circuits implement prediction and creativity and how these processes influence goal-directed behavior in embodied systems.

Jacqueline Gottlieb, PhD, Columbia University, USA

Jacqueline Gottlieb is Professor of Neuroscience at Columbia University and an Associate Editor at Communications Biology. Her interdisciplinary research combines neuroscience, cognitive science, and computational approaches to investigate the neural and computational mechanisms underlying attention, information seeking, curiosity, and decision-making. She is the recipient of numerous awards and the author of more than 100 publications in leading journals including Science, Nature Neuroscience, Neuron, and PNAS.

How can I submit my paper?

Visit the Collection page to find out more about this collection and submit your article.