Cognitive control refers to the use of internal goals to guide how we process stimuli, and control can be applied proactively (in anticipation of a stimulus) or reactively (once that stimulus has been presented). The application of control can be guided by memory; for instance, people typically learn to adjust their level of attentional selectivity to changing task statistics, such as different frequencies of hard and easy trials in the Stroop task. This type of “control-learning” is highly adaptive, but its boundary conditions are currently not well understood. In the present study, we assessed how the presence of performance feedback shapes control-learning in the context of item-specific (reactive control, Experiments 1a and 1b) and list-wide (proactive control, Experiments 2a and 2b) proportion of congruency manipulations in a Stroop protocol. We found that performance feedback did not alter the modulation of the Stroop effect by item-specific cueing, but did enhance the modulation of the Stroop effect by a list-wide context. Performance feedback thus selectively promoted proactive, but not reactive, adaptation of cognitive control. These results have important implications for experimental designs, potential psychiatric treatment, and theoretical accounts of the mechanisms underlying control-learning.
Control-learning describes the process through which memory guides how humans adjust their attentional priorities across various contexts, and it is typically assessed by analyzing how people learn to adjust their attentional priorities to different frequencies of hard and easy trials on tasks that challenge attention. Here, we manipulated how often particular images (item-specific) or blocks of trials (list-wide) were predictive of difficult trials and found that performance feedback selectively promoted the recruitment of anticipatory, proactive control, represented by the list-wide proportion congruent paradigm, and had little impact on the recruitment of in-the-moment, reactive control, represented by the item-specific proportion congruent paradigm. These results suggest that intrinsic motivation manipulations can enhance the recruitment of costly proactive control, which may prove especially useful for psychiatric disorders like schizophrenia in which proactive control is impaired.