Reward Favors the Prepared: Incentive and Task-Informative Cues Interact to Enhance Attentional Control

The dual mechanisms of control account suggests that cognitive control may be implemented through relatively proactive mechanisms in anticipation of stimulus onset, or through reactive mechanisms, triggered in response to changing stimulus demands. Reward incentives and task-informative cues (signaling the presence/absence of upcoming cognitive demand) have both been found to influence cognitive control in a proactive or preparatory fashion; yet, it is currently unclear whether and how such cue effects interact. We investigated this in 2 experiments using an adapted flanker paradigm, where task-informative and reward incentive cues were orthogonally manipulated on a trial-by-trial basis. In Experiment 1, results indicated that incentives not only speed reaction times, but specifically reduce both interference and facilitation effects when combined with task-informative cues, suggesting enhanced proactive attentional control. Experiment 2 manipulated the timing of incentive cue information, demonstrating that such proactive control effects were only replicated with sufficient time to process the incentive cue (early incentive); when incentive signals were presented close to target onset (late incentive) the primary effect was a speed-accuracy trade-off. Together, results suggest that advance cueing may trigger differing control strategies, and that these strategies may critically depend on both the timing-and the motivational incentive-to use such cues.