Cognitive control refers to the ability of human beings to adapt flexibly and quickly to continuously changing environments. Several decades of research have identified a diverse range of mental processes that are associated with cognitive control but the extent to which shared systems underlie cognitive control in social and non-social contexts, as well as how these systems may vary across individuals, remains largely unexplored. By integrating methodological approaches from experimental and differential psychology, the current study is able to shine new light on the relationships between stable features of individuals, such as personality and sex, and the architecture of cognitive control systems using paradigms that index social (automatic imitation) and spatial processes. Across three large-sample experiments (>600 participants in total), we demonstrate that cognitive control systems are largely invariant to stable aspects of personality, but exhibit a sex difference, such that females show greater task-interference than males. Moreover, we further qualified this sex difference in two ways. First, we showed that the sex difference was unrelated to the sex of the interaction partner and therefore did not reflect an in-group bias based on sex. Second, we showed that the sex difference was tied to a form of spatial interference control rather than social (imitative) control and therefore it does not reflect a specialised mechanism for guiding social interactions exclusively. Instead, our findings suggest that a robust sex difference exists in the system (or set of subsystems) that operate in resolving a form of spatial interference control, and that such systems are unaffected by social factors such as the sex of the interaction partner. The results highlight the value of integrating approaches from experimental and differential psychology by providing a deeper understanding of the structure of cognitive control systems, while also providing new dimensions to incorporate into theories and models of social and non-social control.

认知控制是指人类灵活，快速地适应不断变化的环境的能力。几十年来的研究已经确定了与认知控制相关的各种各样的心理过程，但是在社会和非社会背景下，共享系统作为认知控制基础的程度，以及这些系统在个体之间的变化方式仍大有待探索。 。通过整合来自实验心理学和差异心理学的方法论方法，当前的研究能够为人的稳定特征（如人格和性别）与认知控制系统的体系结构之间的关系提供新的启示，该范式使用索引社会（自动模仿）的范式和空间过程。在三个大样本实验中（总计> 600名参与者），我们证明了认知控制系统在很大程度上不改变人格的稳定方面，但表现出性别差异，因此女性比男性表现出更大的任务干扰。此外，我们通过两种方式进一步证明了这种性别差异。首先，我们表明性别差异与互动伴侣的性别无关，因此没有反映出基于性别的群体内偏见。其次，我们表明性别差异是与空间干扰控制而不是社会（模仿）控制有关的，因此它并不反映专门用于指导社会互动的机制。取而代之的是，我们的发现表明，系统（或子系统集）中存在强大的性别差异，这些差异可以解决某种形式的空间干扰控制，并且此类系统不受社交因素（例如，互动伙伴的性别）的影响。这些结果通过提供对认知控制系统结构的更深刻理解，同时还提供了新的维度以将其纳入社会和非社会控制的理论和模型，从而突出了将实验和差异心理学方法相结合的价值。